Dean R. Koontz - Velocity

VELOCITY Dean Koontz, © 2005

This book is dedicated to Donna and Steve Dunio, Vito and Lynn Cerra, Ross and Rosemary Cerra. I’ll never figure out why Gerda said yes to me. But now your family has a crazy wing.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

—Ernest Hemingway,

The Old Man and the Sea

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour Unless his disturbance,

neighbour

makes

too

much

But all dash to and fro in motorcars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

PART 1 THE CHOICE IS YOURS

Chapter 1 With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him. Henry had been killed by a garden gnome. He had fallen off the roof of his two-story house, onto that cheerful-looking figure. The gnome was made of concrete. Henry wasn’t. A broken neck, a cracked skull: Henry perished on impact. This death-by-gnome had occurred four years previously. Ned Pearsall still toasted Henry’s passing at least once a week. Now, from a stool near the curve of the polished mahogany bar, an out-of-towner, the only other customer, expressed curiosity at the enduring nature of Ned’s animosity. “How bad a neighbor could the poor guy have been that you’re still so juiced about him?” Ordinarily, Ned might have ignored the question. He had even less use for tourists than he did for pretzels. The tavern offered free bowls of pretzels because they were cheap. Ned preferred to sustain his thirst with well-salted peanuts. To keep Ned tipping, Billy Wiles, tending bar, occasionally gave him a bag of Planters. Most of the time Ned had to pay for his nuts. This rankled him either because he could not grasp the economic realities of tavern operation or because he enjoyed being rankled, probably the latter. Although he had a head reminiscent of a squash ball and the heavy rounded shoulders of a sumo wrestler, Ned was an athletic man only if you thought barroom jabber and grudge-holding qualified as sports. In those events, he was an Olympian. Regarding the late Henry Friddle, Ned could be as talkative with outsiders as with lifelong residents of Vineyard Hills. When, as now, the

only other customer was a stranger, Ned found silence even less congenial than conversation with a “foreign devil.” Billy himself had never been much of a talker, never one of those barkeeps who considered the bar a stage. He was a listener. To the out-of-towner, Ned declared, “Henry Friddle was a pig.” The stranger had hair as black as coal dust with traces of ash at the temples, gray eyes bright with dry amusement, and a softly resonant voice. “That’s a strong word—pig.” “You know what the pervert was doing on his roof? He was trying to piss on my dining-room windows.” Wiping the bar, Billy Wiles didn’t even glance at the tourist. He’d heard this story so often that he knew all the reactions to it. “Friddle, the pig, figured the altitude would give his stream more distance,” Ned explained. The stranger said, “What was he—an aeronautical engineer?” “He was a college professor. He taught contemporary literature.” “Maybe reading that stuff drove him to suicide,” the tourist said, which made him more interesting than Billy had first thought. “No, no,” Ned said impatiently. “The fall was accidental.” “Was he drunk?” “Why would you think he was drunk?” Ned wondered. The stranger shrugged. “He climbed on a roof to urinate on your windows.” “He was a sick man,” Ned explained, plinking one finger against his empty glass to indicate the desire for another round. Drawing Budweiser from the tap, Billy said, “Henry Friddle was consumed by vengeance.” After silent communion with his brew, the tourist asked Ned Pearsall, “Vengeance? So you urinated on Friddle’s windows first?”

“It wasn’t the same thing at all,” Ned warned in a rough tone that advised the outsider to avoid being judgmental. “Ned didn’t do it from his roof,” Billy said. “That’s right. I walked up to his house, like a man, stood on his lawn, and aimed at his dining-room windows.” “Henry and his wife were having dinner at the time,” Billy said. Before the tourist might express revulsion at the timing of this assault, Ned said, “They were eating quail, for God’s sake.” “You showered their windows because they were eating quail?” Ned sputtered with exasperation. “No, of course not. Do I look insane to you?” He rolled his eyes at Billy. Billy raised his eyebrows as though to say What do you expect of a tourist? “I’m just trying to convey how pretentious they were,” Ned clarified, “always eating quail or snails, or Swiss chard.” “Phony bastards,” the tourist said with such a light seasoning of mockery that Ned Pearsall didn’t detect it, although Billy did. “Exactly,” Ned confirmed. “Henry Friddle drove a Jaguar, and his wife drove a car—you won’t believe this—a car made in Sweden.” “Detroit was too common for them,” said the tourist. “Exactly. How much of a snob do you have to be to bring a car all the way from Sweden?” The tourist said, “I’ll wager they were wine connoisseurs.” “Big time! Did you know them or something?” “I just know the type. They had a lot of books.” “You’ve got ‘em nailed,” Ned declared. “They’d sit on the front porch, sniffing their wine, reading books.” “Right out in public. Imagine that. But if you didn’t pee on their dining-room windows because they were snobs, why did you?”

“A thousand reasons,” Ned assured him. “The incident of the skunk. The incident of the lawn fertilizer. The dead petunias.” “And the garden gnome,” Billy added as he rinsed glasses in the bar sink. “The garden gnome was the last straw,” Ned agreed. “I can understand being driven to aggressive urination by pink plastic flamingos,” said the tourist, “but, frankly, not by a gnome.” Ned scowled, remembering the affront. “Ariadne gave it my face.” “Ariadne who?” “Henry Friddle’s wife. You ever heard a more pretentious name?” “Well, the Friddle part brings it down to earth.” “She was an art professor at the same college. She sculpted the gnome, created the mold, poured the concrete, painted it herself.” “Having a sculpture modeled after you can be an honor.” The beer foam on Ned’s upper lip gave him a rabid appearance as he protested: “It was a gnome, pal. A drunken gnome. The nose was as red as an apple. It was carrying a beer bottle in each hand.” “And its fly was unzipped,” Billy added. “Thanks so much for reminding me,” Ned grumbled. “Worse, hanging out of its pants was the head and neck of a dead goose.” “How creative,” said the tourist. “At first I didn’t know what the hell that meant—” “Symbolism. Metaphor.” “Yeah, yeah. I figured it out. Everybody who walked past their place saw it, and got a laugh at my expense.” “Wouldn’t need to see the gnome for that,” said the tourist. Misunderstanding, Ned agreed: “Right. Just hearing about it, people were laughing. So I busted up the gnome with a sledgehammer.”

“And they sued you.” “Worse. They set out another gnome. Figuring I’d bust up the first, Ariadne had cast and painted a second.” “I thought life was mellow here in the wine country.” “Then they tell me,” Ned continued, “if I bust up the second one, they’ll put a third on the lawn, plus they’ll manufacture a bunch and sell ‘em at cost to anyone who wants a Ned Pearsall gnome.” “Sounds like an empty threat,” said the tourist. “Would there really be people who’d want such a thing?” “Dozens,” Billy assured him. “This town’s become a mean place since the pate-and-brie crowd started moving in from San Francisco,” Ned said sullenly. “So when you didn’t dare take a sledgehammer to the second gnome, you were left with no choice but to pee on their windows.” “Exactly. But I didn’t just go off half-cocked. I thought about the situation for a week. Then I hosed them.” “After which, Henry Friddle climbed on his roof with a full bladder, looking for justice.” “Yeah. But he waited till I had a birthday dinner for my mom.” “Unforgivable,” Billy judged. “Does the Mafia attack innocent members of a man’s family?” Ned asked indignantly. Although the question had been rhetorical, Billy played for his tip: “No. The Mafia’s got class.” “Which is a word these professor types can’t even spell,” Ned said. “Mom was seventy-six. She could have had a heart attack.” “So,” the tourist said, “while trying to urinate on your dining room windows, Friddle fell off his roof and broke his neck on the Ned Pearsall gnome. Pretty ironic.” “I don’t know ironic,” Ned replied. “But it sure was sweet.”

“Tell him what your mom said,” Billy urged. Following a sip of beer, Ned obliged: “My mom told me, ‘Honey, praise the Lord, this proves there’s a God.’” After taking a moment to absorb those words, the tourist said, “She sounds like quite a religious woman.” “She wasn’t always. But at seventy-two, she caught pneumonia.” “It’s sure convenient to have God at a time like that.” “She figured if God existed, maybe He’d save her. If He didn’t exist, she wouldn’t be out nothing but some time wasted on prayer.” “Time,” the tourist advised, “is our most precious possession.” “True,” Ned agreed. “But Mom wouldn’t have wasted much because mostly she could pray while she watched TV.” “What an inspiring story,” said the tourist, and ordered a beer. Billy opened a pretentious bottle of Heineken, provided a fresh chilled glass, and whispered, “This one’s on the house.” “That’s nice of you. Thanks. I’d been thinking you’re quiet and soft-spoken for a bartender, but now maybe I understand why.” From his lonely outpost farther along the bar, Ned Pearsall raised his glass in a toast. “To Ariadne. May she rest in peace.” Although it might have been against his will, the tourist was engaged again. Of Ned, he asked, “Not another gnome tragedy?” “Cancer. Two years after Henry fell off the roof. I sure wish it hadn’t happened.” Pouring the fresh Heineken down the side of his tilted glass, the stranger said, “Death has a way of putting our petty squabbles in perspective.” “I miss her,” Ned said. “She had the most spectacular rack, and she didn’t always wear a bra.” The tourist twitched.

“She’d be working in the yard,” Ned remembered almost dreamily, “or walking the dog, and that fine pair would be bouncing and swaying so sweet you couldn’t catch your breath.” The tourist checked his face in the back-bar mirror, perhaps to see if he looked as appalled as he felt. “Billy,” Ned asked, “didn’t she have the finest set of mamas you could hope to see?” “She did,” Billy agreed. Ned slid off his stool, shambled toward the men’s room, paused at the tourist. “Even when cancer withered her, those mamas didn’t shrink. The leaner she got, the bigger they were in proportion. Almost to the end, she looked hot. What a waste, huh, Billy?” “What a waste,” Billy echoed as Ned continued to the men’s room. After a shared silence, the tourist said, “You’re an interesting guy, Billy Barkeep.” “Me? I’ve never hosed anyone’s windows.” “You’re like a sponge, I think. You take everything in.” Billy picked up a dishcloth and polished some pilsner glasses that had previously been washed and dried. “But then you’re a stone too,” the tourist said, “because if you’re squeezed, you give nothing back.” Billy continued polishing the glasses. The gray eyes, bright with amusement, brightened further. “You’re a man with a philosophy, which is unusual these days, when most people don’t know who they are or what they believe, or why.” This, too, was a style of barroom jabber with which Billy was familiar, though he didn’t hear it often. Compared to Ned Pearsall’s rants, such boozy observations could seem erudite; but it was all just beer-based psychoanalysis. He was disappointed. Briefly, the tourist had seemed different from the usual two-cheeked heaters who warmed the barstool vinyl.

Smiling, shaking his head, Billy said, “Philosophy. You give me too much credit.” The tourist sipped his Heineken. Although Billy had not intended to say more, he heard himself continue: “Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect much, enjoy what you have.” The stranger smiled. “Be self-sufficient, don’t get involved, let the world go to Hell if it wants.” “Maybe,” Billy conceded. “Admittedly, it’s not Plato,” said the tourist, “but it is a philosophy.” “You have one of your own?” Billy asked. “Right now, I believe that my life will be better and more meaningful if I can just avoid any further conversation with Ned.” “That’s not a philosophy,” Billy told him. “That’s a fact.” At ten minutes past four, Ivy Elgin came to work. She was a waitress as good as any and an object of desire without equal. Billy liked her but didn’t long for her. His lack of lust made him unique among the men who worked or drank in the tavern. Ivy had mahogany hair, limpid eyes the color of brandy, and the body for which Hugh Hefner had spent his life, searching. Although twenty-four, she seemed genuinely unaware that she was the essential male fantasy in the flesh. She was never seductive. At times she could be flirtatious, but only in a winsome way. Her beauty and choirgirl wholesomeness were a combination so erotic that her smile alone could melt the average man’s earwax. “Hi, Billy,” Ivy said, coming directly to the bar. “I saw a dead possum along Old Mill Road, about a quarter mile from Kornell Lane.” “Naturally dead or road kill?” he asked. “Fully road kill.”

“What do you think it means?” “Nothing specific yet,” she said, handing her purse to him so he could store it behind the bar. “It’s the first dead thing I’ve seen in a week, so it depends on what other bodies show up, if any.” Ivy believed that she was a haruspex. Haruspices, a class of priests in ancient Rome, divined the future from the entrails of animals killed in sacrifices. They had been respected, even revered, by other Romans, but most likely they had not received a lot of party invitations. Ivy wasn’t morbid. Haruspicy did not occupy the center of her life. She seldom talked to customers about it. Neither did she have the stomach to stir through entrails. For a haruspex, she was squeamish. Instead, she found meaning in the species of the cadaver, in the circumstances of its discovery, in its position related to the points of the compass, and in other arcane aspects of its condition. Her predictions seldom if ever came true, but Ivy persisted. “Whatever it turns out to mean,” she told Billy as she picked up her order pad and a pencil, “it’s a bad sign. A dead possum never indicates good fortune.” “I’ve noticed that myself.” “Especially not when its nose is pointing north and its tail is pointing east.” Thirsty men trailed through the door soon after Ivy, as if she were a mirage of an oasis that they had been pursuing all day. Only a few sat at the bar; the others kept her bustling table to table. Although the tavern’s middle-class clientele were not high rollers, Ivy’s income from tips exceeded what she might have earned had she attained a doctoral degree in economics. An hour later, at five o’clock, Shirley Trueblood, the second evening waitress, came on duty. Fifty-six, stout, wearing jasmine perfume, Shirley had her own following. Certain men in barrooms always wanted mothering.

Some women, too. The day-shift short-order cook, Ben Vernon, went home. The evening cook, Ramon Padillo, came aboard. The tavern offered only bar food: cheeseburgers, fries, Buffalo wings, quesadillas, nachos… Ramon had noticed that on the nights Ivy Elgin worked, the spicy dishes sold in greater numbers than when she wasn’t waitressing. Guys ordered more things in tomatillo sauce, went through a lot of little bottles of Tabasco, and asked for sliced jalapenos on their burgers. “I think,” Ramon once told Billy, “they’re unconsciously packing heat into their gonads to be ready if she comes on to them.” “No one in this joint has a chance at Ivy,” Billy assured him. “You never know,” Ramon had said coyly. “Don’t tell me you’re packing in the peppers, too.” “So many I have killer heartburn some nights,” Ramon had said. “But I’m ready.” With Ramon came the evening bartender, Steve Zillis, whose shift overlapped Billy’s by an hour. At twenty-four, he was ten years younger than Billy but twenty years less mature. For Steve, the height of sophisticated humor was any limerick sufficiently obscene to cause grown men to blush. He could tie knots in a cherry stem with just his tongue, load his right nostril with peanuts and fire them accurately into a target glass, and blow cigarette smoke out of his right ear. As usual, Steve vaulted over the end gate in the bar instead of pushing through it. “How’re they hangin’, Kemosabe?” “One hour to go,” Billy said, “and I get my life back.” “This is life,” Steve protested. “The center of the action.” The tragedy of Steve Zillis was that he meant what he said. To him, this common tavern was a glamorous cabaret. After tying on an apron, he snatched three olives from a bowl, juggled them with dazzling speed, and then caught them one at a time in his mouth.

When two drunks at the bar clapped loudly, Steve basked in their applause as if he were the star tenor at the Metropolitan Opera and had earned the adulation of a refined and knowledgeable audience. In spite of the affliction of Steve Zillis’s company, this final hour of Billy’s shift passed quickly. The tavern was busy enough to keep two bartenders occupied as the late-afternoon tipplers delayed going home and the evening drinkers arrived. As much as he ever could, Billy liked the place during this transitional time. The customers were at peak coherency and happier than they would be later, when alcohol washed them toward melancholy. Because the windows faced east and the sun lay west, softest daylight painted the panes. The ceiling fixtures layered a coppery glow over the burnt-red mahogany paneling and booths. The fragrant air was savory with the scents of wood flooring pickled in stale beer, candle wax, cheeseburgers, fried onion rings. Billy didn’t like the place enough, however, to linger past the end of his shift. He left promptly at seven. If he’d been Steve Zillis, he would have made a production of his exit. Instead, he departed as quietly as a ghost dematerializing from its haunt. Outside, less than two hours of summer daylight remained. The sky was an electric Maxfield Parrish blue in the east, a paler blue in the west, where the sun still bleached it. As he approached his Ford Explorer, he noticed a rectangle of white paper under the driver’s-side windshield wiper. Behind the steering wheel, with his door still open, he unfolded the paper, expecting to find a handbill of some kind, advertising a car wash or a maid service. He discovered a neatly typed message:

If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.

You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.

Billy didn’t at that instant feel the world tilt under him, but it did. The plunge had not yet begun, but it would. Soon.

Chapter 2 Mickey Mouse took a bullet in the throat. The 9-mm pistol cracked three more times in rapid succession, shredding Donald Duck’s face. Lanny Olsen, the shooter, lived at the end of a fissured blacktop lane, against a stony hillside where grapes would never grow. He had no view of the fabled Napa Valley. As compensation for his unfashionable address, the property was shaded by beautiful plum trees and towering elms, brightened by wild azaleas. And it was private. The nearest neighbor lived at such a distance that Lanny could have partied 24/7 without disturbing anyone. This offered no benefit to Lanny because he usually went to bed at nine-thirty; his idea of a party was a case of beer, a bag of chips, and a poker game. The location of his property, however, was conducive to target shooting. He was the most practiced shot in the sheriff’s department. As a boy, he’d wanted to be a cartoonist. He had talent. The Disney-perfect portraits of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, fixed to the hay-bale backstop, were Lanny’s work. Ejecting the spent magazine from his pistol, Lanny said, “You should have been here yesterday. I head-shot twelve Road Runners in a row, not a wasted round.”

Billy said, “Wile E. Coyote would’ve been thrilled. You ever shoot at ordinary targets?” “What would be the fun in that?” “You ever shoot the Simpsons?” “Homer, Bart—all of them but Marge,” Lanny said. “Never Marge.” Lanny might have gone to art school if his domineering father, Ansel, had not been determined that his son would follow him into law enforcement as Ansel himself had followed his father. Pearl, Lanny’s mother, had been as supportive as her illness allowed. When Lanny was sixteen, Pearl had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Radiation therapy and drugs sapped her. Even in periods when the lymphoma was controlled, she did not fully regain her strength. Concerned that his father would be a useless nurse, Lanny never went away to art school. He remained at home, took up a career in law enforcement, and looked after his mother. Unexpectedly, Ansel was first to die. He stopped a motorist for speeding, and the motorist stopped him with a .38 fired pointblank. Having contracted lymphoma at an atypically young age, Pearl lived with it for a surprisingly long time. She had died ten years previously, when Lanny was thirty-six. He’d still been young enough for a career switch and art school. Inertia, however, proved stronger than the desire for a new life. He inherited the house, a handsome Victorian with elaborate millwork and an encircling veranda, which he maintained in pristine condition. With a career that was a job but not a passion, and with no family of his own, he had plenty of spare time for the house. As Lanny shoved a fresh magazine in the pistol, Billy took the typewritten message from a pocket. “What do you make of this?” Lanny read the two paragraphs while, in the lull of gunfire, blackbirds returned to the high bowers of nearby elms.

The message evoked neither a frown nor a smile from Lanny, though Billy had expected one or the other. “Where’d you get this?” “Somebody left it under my windshield wiper.” “Where were you parked?” “At the tavern.” “An envelope?” “No.” “You see anyone watching you? I mean, when you took it out from under the wiper and read it.” “Nobody.” “What do you make of it?” “That was my question to you,” Billy reminded him. “A prank. A sick joke.” Staring at the ominous lines of type, Billy said, “That was my first reaction, but then…” Lanny stepped sideways, aligning himself with new hay bales faced with full-figure drawings of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. “But then you ask yourself What if… ?” “Don’t you?” “Sure. Every cop does, all the time, otherwise he ends up dead sooner than he should. Or shoots when he shouldn’t.” Not long ago, Lanny had wounded a belligerent drunk who he thought had been armed. Instead of a gun, the guy had a cell phone. “But you can’t keep what-ifing yourself forever,” he continued. “You’ve got to go with instinct. And your instinct is the same as mine. It’s a prank. Besides, you’ve got a hunch who did it.” “Steve Zillis,” said Billy. “Bingo.”

Lanny assumed an isosceles shooting stance, right leg quartered back for balance, left knee flexed, two hands on the pistol. He took a deep breath and popped Elmer five times as a shrapnel of blackbirds exploded from the elms and tore into the sky. Counting four mortal hits and one wound, Billy said, “The thing is… this doesn’t seem like something Steve would do—or could.” “Why not?” “He’s a guy who carries a small rubber bladder in his pocket so he can make a loud farting sound when he thinks that might be funny.” “Meaning?” Billy folded the typewritten message and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “This seems too complex for Steve, too… subtle.” “Young Steve is about as subtle as the green-apple nasties,” Lanny agreed. Resuming his stance, he spent the second half of the magazine on Bugs, scoring five mortal hits. “What if it’s real?” Billy asked. “It’s not.” “But what if it is?” “Homicidal lunatics only play games like that in movies. In real life, killers just kill. Power is what it’s about for them, the power and sometimes violent sex—not teasing you with puzzles and riddles.” Ejected shell casings littered the grass. The westering sun polished the tubes of brass to a bloody gold. Aware that he hadn’t quelled Billy’s doubt, Lanny continued: “Even if it were real—and it’s not—what is there to act upon in that note?” “Blond schoolteachers, elderly women.” “Somewhere in Napa County.” “Yeah.”

“Napa County isn’t San Francisco,” Lanny said, “but it’s not unpopulated barrens, either. Lots of people in lots of towns. The sheriff’s department plus every police force in the county together don’t have enough men to cover all those bases.” “You don’t need to cover them all. He qualifies his targets—a lovely blond schoolteacher.” “That’s a judgment,” Lanny objected. “Some blond schoolteacher you find lovely might be a hag to me.” “I didn’t realize you had such high standards in women.” Lanny smiled. “I’m picky.” “Anyway there’s also the elderly woman active in charity work.” Jamming a third magazine in the pistol, Lanny said, “A lot of elderly women are active in charities. They come from a generation that cared about their neighbors.” “So you aren’t going to do anything?” “What do you want me to do?” Billy had no suggestion, only an observation: “It seems like we ought to do something.” “By nature, police are reactive, not proactive.” “So he has to murder somebody first?” “He isn’t going to murder anyone.” “He says he will,” Billy protested. “It’s a prank. Steve Zillis has finally graduated from squirting-flowers-and-plastic-vomit school of humor.”

the

Billy nodded. “You’re probably right.” “I’m for sure right.” Indicating the remaining colorful figures fixed to the triple-thick wall of hay bales, Lanny said, “Now before twilight spoils my aim, I want to kill the cast of Shrek.” “I thought they were good movies.”

“I’m not a critic,” Lanny said impatiently, “just a guy having some fun and sharpening his work skills.” “Okay, all right, I’m out of here. See you Friday for poker.” “Bring something,” Lanny said. “Like what?” “Jose’s bringing his pork-and-rice casserole. Leroy’s bringing five kinds of salsa and lots of corn chips. Why don’t you make your tamale pie?” As Lanny spoke, Billy winced. “We sound like a group of old maids planning a quilting party.” “We’re pathetic,” Lanny said, “but we’re not dead yet.” “How would we know?” “If I were dead and in Hell,” Lanny said, “they wouldn’t let me have the pleasure of drawing cartoons. And this sure isn’t Heaven.” By the time Billy reached his Explorer in the driveway, Lanny Olsen had begun to blast away at Shrek, Princess Fiona, Donkey, and their friends. The eastern sky was sapphire. In the western vault, the blue had begun to wear off, revealing gold beneath, and the hint of red gesso under the gilt. Standing by his SUV in the lengthening shadows, Billy watched for a moment as Lanny honed his marksmanship and, for the thousandth time, tried to kill off his unfulfilled dream of being a cartoonist.

Chapter 3 An enchanted princess, recumbent in a castle tower, dreaming the years away until awakened by a kiss, could not have been lovelier than Barbara Mandel abed at the Whispering Pines.

In the caress of lamplight, her golden hair spilled across the pillow, as lustrous as bullion poured from a smelter’s cauldron. Standing at her bedside, Billy Wiles had never seen a bisque doll with a complexion as pale or as flawless as Barbara’s. Her skin appeared translucent, as though the light penetrated the surface and then brightened her face from within. If he were to lift aside the thin blanket and sheet, he would expose an indignity not visited on enchanted princesses. An enteral-nutrition tube had been inserted surgically into her stomach. The doctor had ordered a slow continuous feeding. The drip pump purred softly as it supplied a perpetual dinner. She had been in a coma for almost four years. Hers was not the most severe of comas. Sometimes she yawned, sighed, moved her right hand to her face, her throat, her breast. Occasionally she spoke, though never more than a few cryptic words, not to anyone in the room but to some phantom of the mind. Even when she spoke or moved her hand, she remained unaware of everything around her. She was unconscious, unresponsive to external stimulation. At the moment she lay quiet, brow as smooth as milk in a pail, eyes unmoving behind their lids, lips slightly parted. No ghost breathed with less sound. From a jacket pocket, Billy took a small wire-bound notebook. Clipped to it was a half-size ballpoint pen. He put them on the nightstand. The small room was simply furnished: one hospital bed, one nightstand, one chair. Long ago Billy had added a barstool that allowed him to sit high enough to watch over Barbara. Whispering Pines Convalescent Home provided good care but an austere environment. Half the patients were convalescing; the other half were merely being warehoused. Perched on the stool beside the bed, he told her about his day. He began with a description of the sunrise and ended with Lanny’s shooting gallery of cartoon celebrities.

Although she had never responded to anything he’d said, Billy suspected that in her deep redoubt, Barbara could hear him. He needed to believe that his presence, his voice, his affection comforted her. When he had no more to say, he continued to gaze at her. He did not always see her as she was now. He saw her as she’d once been—vivid, vivacious—and as she might be today if fate had been kinder. After a while he extracted the folded message from his shirt pocket and read it again. He had just finished when Barbara spoke in murmurs from which meaning melted almost faster than the ear could hear: “I want to know what it says…” Electrified, he rose from the stool. He leaned over the bed rail to stare more closely at her. Never before had anything she’d said, in her coma, seemed to relate to anything that he said or did while visiting. “Barbara?” She remained still, eyes closed, lips parted, apparently no more alive than the object of mourning on a catafalque. “Can you hear me?” With trembling fingertips, he touched her face. She did not respond. He had already told her what the strange message said, but now he read it to her just in case her murmured words had referred to it. When he finished, she did not react. He spoke her name without effect. Sitting on the stool once more, he plucked the little notebook from the nightstand. With the small pen, he recorded her seven words and the date that she had spoken them. He had a notebook for each year of her unnatural sleep. Although each contained only a hundred three-by-four-inch pages, none had been filled, as she did not speak on every—or even most—visits. I want to know what it says After dating that unusually complete statement, he flipped pages, looking back through the notebook, reading not the dates but just some of

her words. LAMBS COULD NOT FORGIVE BEEF-FACED BOYS MY INFANT TONGUE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS TOMBSTONE PAPA, POTATOES, POULTRY, PRUNES, PRISM SEASON OF DARKNESS IT SWELLS FORWARD ONE GREAT HEAVE ALL FLASHES AWAY TWENTY-THREE, TWENTY-THREE In her words, Billy could find neither coherence nor a clue to any. From time to time through the weeks, the months, she smiled faintly. Twice in his experience she had laughed softly. On other occasions, however, her whispered words disturbed him, sometimes chilled him. TORN, BRUISED, PANTING, BLEEDING GORE AND FIRE HATCHETS, KNIVES, BAYONETS RED IN THEIR EYES, THEIR FRENZIED EYES These dismaying utterances were not delivered in a tone of distress. They came in the same uninflected murmur with which she spoke less troubling words. Nevertheless, they concerned Billy. He worried that at the bottom of her coma, she occupied a dark and fearsome place, that she felt trapped and threatened, and alone. Now her brow furrowed and she spoke again, “The sea…” When he wrote this down, she gave him more: “What it is…” The stillness in the room grew more profound, as if countless fathoms of thickening atmosphere pressed all currents from the air, so that her soft voice carried to Billy. To her lips, her right hand rose as though to feel the texture of her words. “What it is that it keeps on saying.” This was the most coherent she had been, in coma, and seldom had she said as much in a single visit. “Barbara?” “I want to know what it says… the sea.” She lowered her hand to her breast. The furrows faded from her brow. Her eyes, which as she spoke had roved beneath their lids, grew fixed once more.

Pen poised over paper, Billy waited, but Barbara matched the silence of the room. And the silence deepened, and the stillness, until he felt that he must go or meet a fate similar to that of a prehistoric fly preserved in amber. She would lie in this hush for hours or for days, or forever. He kissed her but not on the mouth. That would feel like a violation. Her cheek was soft and cool against his lips. Three years, ten months, four days, she had been in this coma, into which she had fallen only a month after accepting an engagement ring from Billy.

Chapter 4 Billy did not have the isolation that Lanny enjoyed, but he lived on an acre shrouded by alders and deodar cedars, along a lane with few residences. He didn’t know his neighbors. He might not have known them even if they had lived closer. He was grateful for their disinterest. The original owner of the house and the architect had evidently negotiated each other into a hybrid structure, half bungalow, half upscale cabin. The lines were those of a bungalow. The cedar siding, silvered by the weather, belonged on a cabin, as did the front porch with rough-hewn posts supporting the roof. Unlike most bipolar houses, this one appeared cozy. Diamond-pane, beveled-glass windows—pure bungalow—looked bejeweled when the lights were on. In daylight the leaping-deer weather vane on the roof turned with lazy grace even in turbulent scrambles of wind. The detached garage, which also contained his woodworking shop, stood behind the house. After Billy parked the Explorer and closed the big door behind it, as he walked across the backyard toward the house, an owl hooted from its perch

on the ridge line of the garage roof. No other owls answered. But Billy thought he heard mice squeak, and he could almost feel them shivering in the shrubbery, yearning for the tall grass beyond the yard. His mind felt swampy, his thoughts muddy. He paused and took a deep breath, savoring air redolent of the fragrant bark and needles of the deodars. The astringent scent cleared his head. Clarity proved undesirable. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but now he wanted a beer and a shot. The stars looked hard. They were bright, too, in the cloudless sky, but the feeling he got from them was hardness. Neither the back steps nor the floorboards of the porch creaked. He had plenty of time to keep the place in good, tight condition. After gutting the kitchen, he himself had built the cabinets. They were cherry wood with a dark stain. He had laid the tile floor: black-granite squares. The granite countertops matched the floor. Clean and simple. He had intended to do the whole house in that style, but then he had lost his way. He poured a cold bottle of Guinness stout into a mug, spiked it with bourbon. When he did drink, he wanted punch in both the texture and the taste. He was making a pastrami sandwich when the phone rang. “Hello?” The caller did not respond even when Billy said hello again. Ordinarily, he would have thought the line was dead. Not this evening. Listening, he fished the typewritten message from his pocket. He unfolded it and smoothed it flat on the black-granite counter. Hollow as a bell, but a bell without a clapper, the open line carried no fizz of static. Billy couldn’t hear the caller inhale or exhale, as if the guy were dead, and done with breathing. Whether prankster or killer, the man’s purpose was to taunt, intimidate.

Billy didn’t give him the satisfaction of a third hello. They listened to each other’s silence, as if something could be learned from nothing. After perhaps a minute, Billy began to wonder if he might be imagining a presence on the far end of the line. If he was in fact ear-to-ear with the author of the note, hanging up first would be a mistake. His disconnection would be taken as a sign of fear or at least of weakness. Life had taught him patience. Besides, his self-image included the possibility that he could be fatuous, so he didn’t worry about looking foolish. He waited. When the caller hung up, the distinct sound of the disconnect proved that he had been there, and then the dial tone. Before continuing to make his sandwich, Billy walked the four rooms and bath. He lowered the pleated shades over all the windows. At the dinette table in the kitchen, he ate the sandwich and two dill pickles. He drank a second stout, this time without the added bourbon. He had no TV. The entertainment shows bored him, and he didn’t need the news. His thoughts were his only company at dinner. He did not linger over the pastrami sandwich. Books lined one wall of the living room from floor to ceiling. For most of his life, Billy had been a voracious reader. He had lost interest in reading three years, ten months, and four days previously. A mutual love of books, of fiction in all genres, had brought him and Barbara together. On one shelf stood a set of Dickens in matched bindings, which Barbara had given him for Christmas. She’d had a passion for Dickens. These days, he needed to keep busy. Just sitting in a chair with a book made him restless. He felt vulnerable somehow. Besides, some books contained disturbing ideas. They started you

thinking about things you wanted to forget, and though your thoughts became intolerable, you could not put them to rest. The coffered ceiling of the living room was a consequence of his need to remain busy. Every coffer was trimmed with dentil molding. The center of each featured a cluster of acanthus leaves hand-carved from white oak, stained to match the surrounding mahogany. The style of this ceiling suited neither a cabin nor a bungalow. He didn’t care. The project had kept him occupied for months. In his study, the coffered ceiling was even more ornate than the ceiling in the living room. He did not go to the desk, where the unused computer mocked him. Instead, he sat at a worktable arrayed with his carving tools. Here also were stacks of white-oak blocks. They had a sweet wood smell. The blocks were raw material for the ornamentation’s that would decorate the bedroom ceiling, which was currently bare plaster. On the table stood a CD player and two small speakers. The disc deck was loaded with zydeco music. He switched it on. He carved until his hands ached and his vision blurred. Then he turned off the music and went to bed. Lying on his back in the dark, staring at a ceiling that he could not see, he waited for his eyes to fall shut. He waited. He heard something on the roof. Something scratching at the cedar-shake shingles. The owl, no doubt. The owl did not hoot. Perhaps it was a raccoon. Or something. He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Twenty minutes past midnight. You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours. Everything would be all right in the morning. Everything always was. Well, not all right, but good enough to encourage perseverance. I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying. A few times, he closed his eyes, but that was no good. They had to fall shut on their own for sleep to follow. He looked at the clock as it changed from 12:59 to 1:00. The note had been under the windshield wiper when he had come out of the tavern at seven o’clock. Six hours had passed. Someone had been murdered. Or not. Surely not. Below the scratching talons of the owl, if it was an owl, he slept.

Chapter 5 The tavern had no name. Or, rather, its function was its name. The sign at the top of the pole, as you turned from the state highway into the elm-encircled parking lot, said only TAVERN. Jackie O’Hara owned the place. Fat, freckled, kind, he was to everyone a friend or honorary uncle. He had no desire to see his name on the sign. As a boy, Jackie had wanted to be a priest. He wanted to help people. He wanted to lead them to God. Time had taught him that he might not be able to master his appetites. While still young, he had arrived at the conclusion that he would be a bad priest, which hadn’t been the nature of his dream. He found self-respect in running a clean and friendly taproom, but it seemed to him that simple satisfaction in his accomplishments would sour into vanity if he named the tavern after himself. In Billy Wiles’s opinion, Jackie would have made a fine priest. Every human being has appetites difficult to control, but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses. Vineyard Hills Tavern. Shady Elm Tavern. Candlelight Tavern. Wayside Tavern. Patrons regularly offered names for the place. Jackie found their suggestions to be either awkward or inappropriate, or twee. When Billy arrived at 10:45 Tuesday morning, fifteen minutes before the tavern opened, the only cars in the lot were Jackie’s and Ben Vernon’s. Ben was the day cook. Standing beside his Explorer, he studied the low serried hills in the distance, on the far side of the highway. They were dark brown where scalped by earthmovers, pale brown where the wild grass had been faded

from green by the arid summer heat. Peerless Properties, an international corporation, was building a world-class resort, to be called Vineland, on nine hundred acres. In addition to a hotel with golf course, three pools, tennis club, and other amenities, the project included 190 multimillion-dollar getaway homes for sale to those who took their leisure seriously. Foundations had been poured in early spring. Walls were rising. Much closer than the palatial structures on the higher hills, less than a hundred feet from the highway, a dramatic mural neared completion in a meadow. Seventy feet high, 150 feet long, three-dimensional, it was of wood, painted gray with black shadowing. In the Art Deco tradition, the mural presented a stylized image of powerful machinery, including the drive wheels and connecting rods of a locomotive. There also were huge gears, strange armatures, and arcane mechanical forms that had nothing to do with a train. A giant, stylized figure of a man in work clothes was featured in the section that suggested a locomotive. Body angled left to right as if leaning into a stiff wind, he appeared to be pushing one of the enormous drive wheels, as if caught up in the machine and pressing forward with as much panic as determination, as though if he rested for an instant he would slip out of sync and be torn to pieces. None of the animated mural’s moving parts was yet operational; nevertheless, it fostered a convincing illusion of movement, speed. On commission, a famous artist with a single name—Valis—had designed the thing and had built it with a crew of sixteen. The mural was meant to symbolize the hectic pace of modern life, the harried individual overwhelmed by the forces of society. On the day when the resort opened for business, Valis himself would set the thing afire and burn it to the ground to symbolize the freedom from the mad pace of life that the new resort represented. Most locals in Vineyard Hills and the surrounding territory mocked the mural, and when they called it art, they pronounced the word with quotation marks.

Billy rather liked the hulking thing, but burning it down didn’t make sense to him. The same artist had once fixed twenty thousand helium-filled red balloons to a bridge in Australia, so it appeared to be supported by them. With a remote control, he popped all twenty thousand at once. In that case, Billy didn’t understand either the “art” or the point of popping it. Although not a critic, he felt this mural was either low art or high craftsmanship. Burning it made no more sense to him than would a museum tossing Rembrandt’s paintings on a bonfire. So many things about contemporary society dismayed him that he wouldn’t lose sleep over this small issue. But on the night of burning, he wouldn’t come to watch the fire, either. He went into the tavern. The air carried such a rich scent that it almost seemed to have flavor. Ben Vernon was cooking a pot of chili. Behind the bar, Jackie O’Hara conducted an inventory of the liquor supply. “Billy, did you see that special on Channel Six last night?” “No.” “You didn’t see that special about UFO’s, alien abduction?” “I was carving to zydeco.” “This guy says he was taken up to a mother ship orbiting the earth.” “What’s new about that? You hear that stuff all the time.” “He says he was given a proctological exam by a bunch of space aliens.” Billy pushed through the bar gate. “That’s what they all say.” “I know. You’re right. But I don’t get it.” Jackie frowned. “Why would a superior alien race, a thousand times more intelligent than we are, come trillions of miles across the universe just to look up our butts? What are they—perverts?”

“They never looked up mine,” Billy assured him. “And I doubt they looked up this guy’s, either.” “He’s got a lot of credibility. He’s a book author. I mean, even before this book, he published a bunch of others.” Taking an apron from a drawer, tying it on, Billy said, “Just publishing a book doesn’t give anyone credibility. Hitler published books.” “He did?” Jackie asked. “Yeah.” “The Hitler?” “Well, it wasn’t Bob Hitler.” “You’re jerking my chain.” “Look it up.” “What did he write—like spy stories or something?” “Something,” Billy said. “This guy wrote science fiction.” “Surprise.” “Science fiction,” Jackie emphasized. “The program was really disturbing.” Picking up a small white dish from the work bar, he made a sound of impatience and disgust. “What—am I gonna have to start docking Steve for condiments?” In the dish were fifteen to twenty maraschino-cherry stems. Each had been tied in a knot. “The customers find him amusing,” Billy said. “Because they’re half blitzed. Anyway, he pretends to be a funny type of guy, but he’s not.” “Everyone has his own idea of what’s funny.” “No, I mean, he pretends to be lighthearted, happy-go-lucky, but he’s not.”

“That’s the only way I’ve ever seen him,” Billy said. “Ask Celia Reynolds.” “Who’s she?” “Lives next door to Steve.” “Neighbors can have grudges,” Billy suggested. “Can’t always believe what they say.” “Celia says he has rages in the backyard.” “What’s that mean—rages?” “He goes like nuts, she says. He chops up stuff.” “What stuff?” “Like a dining-room chair.” “Whose?” “His. He chopped it until there wasn’t anything but splinters.” “Why?” “He’s cursing and angry when he’s at it. He seems to be working off anger.” “On a chair.” “Yeah. And he does watermelons with an ax.” “Maybe he likes watermelon,” Billy said. “He doesn’t eat them. He just chops and chops till nothing’s left but mush.” “Cursing all the time.” “That’s right. Cursing, grunting, snarling like an animal. Whole watermelons. A couple of times he’s done dummies.” “What dummies?” “You know, like those store-window women.”

“Mannequins?” “Yeah. He goes at them with an ax and a sledgehammer.” “Where would he get mannequins?” “Beats me.” “This doesn’t sound right.” “Talk to Celia. She’ll tell you.” “Has she asked Steve why he does it?” “No. She’s afraid to.” “You believe her?” “Celia isn’t a liar.” “You think Steve’s dangerous?” Billy asked. “Probably not, but who knows.” “Maybe you should fire him.” Jackie raised his eyebrows. “And then he turns out to be one of those guys you see on TV news? He comes in here with an ax?” “Anyway,” Billy said, “it doesn’t sound right. You don’t really believe it yourself.” “Yeah, I do. Celia goes to Mass three mornings a week.” “Jackie, you joke around with Steve. You’re relaxed with him.” “I’m always a little watchful.” “I never noticed it.” “Well, I am. But I don’t want to be unfair to him.” “Unfair?” “He’s a good bartender, does his job.” A shamefaced expression overcame Jackie O’Hara. His plump cheeks reddened. “I shouldn’t have been talking about him like this. It was just all those cherry stems. That

ticked me off a little.” “Twenty cherries,” Billy said. “What can they cost?” “It’s not about the money. It’s that trick with his tongue—it’s semi-obscene.” “I never heard anyone complain about it. A lot of the women customers particularly like to watch him do it.” “And the gays,” Jackie said. “I don’t want this being a singles bar, either gay or straight. I want this to be a family bar.” “Is there such a thing as a family bar?” “Absolutely.” Jackie looked hurt. In spite of its generic name, the tavern wasn’t a dive. “We offer kid portions of French fries and onion rings, don’t we?” Before Billy could reply, the first customer of the day came through the door. It was 11:04. The guy wanted brunch: a Bloody Mary with a celery stick. Jackie and Billy tended bar together through the lunchtime traffic, and Jackie served food to the tables as Ben plated it from the grill. They were busier than usual because Tuesday was chili day, but they still didn’t need a first-shift waitress. A third of the customers had lunch in a glass, and another third were satisfied with peanuts or with sausages from the brine jar on the bar, or with free pretzels. Mixing drinks and pouring beers, Billy Wiles was troubled by a persistent image in his mind’s eye: Steve Zillis chopping a mannequin to pieces, chopping, chopping. As his shift wore on, and as no one brought word of a gunshot schoolteacher or a bludgeoned elderly philanthropist, Billy’s nerves quieted. In sleepy Vineyard Hills, in peaceful Napa Valley, news of a brutal murder would travel fast. The note must have been a prank. After a slow afternoon, Ivy Elgin arrived for work at four o’clock, and at her heels thirsty men followed in such a state that they would have wagged their tails if they’d had them. “Anything dead today?” Billy asked her, and found himself wincing at

the question. “A praying mantis on my back porch, right at my doorstep,” Ivy said. “What do you think that means?” “What prays has died.” “I don’t follow.” “I’m still trying to figure it.” Shirley Trueblood arrived at five o’clock, matronly in a pale-yellow uniform with white lapels and cuffs. After her came Ramon Padillo, who sniffed the aroma of chili and grumbled, “Needs a pinch of cumin.” When Steve Zillis breezed in at six, smelling of a verbena-scented aftershave and wintermint mouthwash, he said, “How’re they hangin’, Kemosabe?” “Did you call me last night?” Billy asked. “Who, me? Why would I?” “I don’t know. I got a call, a bad connection, but I thought maybe it was you.” “Did you call me back?” “No. I could hardly hear the voice. I just had a hunch it might be you.” Selecting three plump olives from the condiment tray, Steve said, “Anyway, I was out last night with a friend.” “You get off work at two o’clock in the morning and then you go out?” Steve grinned and winked. “There was a moon, and I’m a dog.” He pronounced it dawg. “If I got off at two A.M., I’d be straight to bed.” “No offense, pilgrim, but you don’t exactly ring the bell on the zing meter.” “What’s that mean?”

Steve shrugged, then began to juggle the slippery olives with impressive dexterity. “People wonder why a good-lookin’ guy like you lives like an old maid.” Surveying the customers, Billy said, “What people?” “Lots of people.” Steve caught the first olive in his mouth, the second, the third, and chewed vigorously to applause from the barstool gallery. During the last hour of his shift, Billy was markedly more observant of Steve Zillis than usual. Yet he saw nothing suspicious. Either the guy wasn’t the prankster or he was immeasurably more cunning and deceitful than he appeared to be. Well, it didn’t matter. No one had been murdered. The note had been a joke; and sooner or later the punch line would be delivered. As Billy was leaving the tavern at seven o’clock, Ivy Elgin came to him, restrained excitement in her brandy-colored eyes. “Somebody’s going to die in a church.” “How do you figure?” “The mantis. What prays has died.” “Which church?” he asked. “We’ll have to wait and see.” “Maybe it won’t be in church. Maybe it’s just that a local minister or a priest is going to die.” Her intoxicating gaze held his. “I didn’t think of that. You might be right. But how does the possum fit in?” “I don’t have a clue. Ivy. I don’t have a talent for haruspicy, like you do.” “I know, but you’re nice. You’re always interested, and you never make fun of me.” Although he worked with Ivy five days a week, the impact of her extraordinary beauty and sexuality could make him forget, at times, that she was in some ways more girl than woman, sweet and guileless, virtuous even if not pure.

Billy said, “I’ll think about the possum. Maybe there’s a little bit of a seer in me that I don’t know about.” Her smile could knock you off balance. “Thanks, Billy. Sometimes this gift… it’s a burden. I could use a little help with it.” Outside, the summer-evening air was lemon yellow with oblique sunshine, and the eastward-crawling shadows of the elms were one shade of purple short of black. As he approached his Ford Explorer, he saw a note under the windshield wiper.

Chapter 6 Although neither a dead blonde nor an elderly cadaver had been reported, Billy halted short of the Explorer, hesitant to proceed, reluctant to read this second message. He wanted nothing more than to sit with Barbara for a while and then to go home. He didn’t see her seven times a week, but he visited more days than not. His stops at Whispering Pines were one of the blocks with which the foundation of his simple life had been built. He looked forward to them as he looked forward to quitting-time and carving. He was not a stupid man, however, and not even merely smart. He knew that his life of seclusion might easily deteriorate into one of solitude. A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope. Slipping the note from under the wiper, crumpling it in his fist, and tossing it aside unread would surely constitute the crossing of the first of those lines. And perhaps there would be no going back.

He did not have much of what he wanted in life. But by nature he was prudent enough to recognize that if he threw away the note, he would also be throwing away everything that now sustained him. His life would be not merely different but worse. In his trance of decision, he had not heard the patrol car enter the lot. As he plucked the note off the windshield, he was surprised by Lanny Olsen’s sudden appearance at his side, in uniform. “Another one,” Lanny declared, as though he had been expecting the second note. His voice had a broken edge. His face was lined with dread. His eyes were windows to a haunted place. Billy’s fate was to live in a time that denied the existence of abominations, that gave the lesser name horror to every abomination, that redefined every horror as a crime, every crime as an offense, every offense as a mere annoyance. Nevertheless, abhorrence rose in him before he knew exactly what had brought Lanny Olsen here. “Billy. Dear sweet Jesus, Billy.” “What?” “I’m sweating. Look at me sweating.” “What—Whatisit?” “I can’t stop sweating. It’s not that hot.” Suddenly Billy felt greasy. He wiped one hand across his face and looked at the palm, expecting filth. To the eye, it appeared to be clean. “I need a beer,” Lanny said. “Two beers. I need to sit down. I need to think.” “Look at me.” Lanny wouldn’t meet his eyes. His attention was fixed on the note in Billy’s hand. That paper remained folded, but something unfolded in Billy’s gut, blossomed like a lubricious flower, oily and many-petaled. Nausea born of intuition.

The right question wasn’t what. The right question was who, and Billy asked it. Lanny licked his lips. “Giselle Winslow.” “I don’t know her.” “Neither do I.” “Where?” “She taught English down in Napa.” “Blond?” “Yeah.” “And lovely,” Billy guessed. “She once was. Somebody beat her nearly to death. She was messed up really bad by someone who knew how to draw it out, how to make it last.” “Nearly to death.” “He finished by strangling her with a pair of her pantyhose.” Billy’s legs felt weak. He leaned against the Explorer. He could not speak. “Her sister found her just two hours ago.” Lanny’s gaze remained fixed on the folded sheet of paper in Billy’s hand. “The sheriff’s department doesn’t have jurisdiction down there,” Lanny continued. “So it’s in the lap of the Napa police. That’s something, anyway. That gives me breathing space.” Billy found his voice, but it was rough and not as he usually sounded to himself. “The note said he’d kill a schoolteacher if I didn’t go to the police, but I went to you.” “He said he’d kill her if you didn’t go to the police and get them involved.” “But I went to you, I tried. I mean, for God’s sake, I tried, didn’t I?”

Lanny met his eyes at last. “You came to me informally. You didn’t actually go to the police. You went to a friend who happened to be a cop.” “But I went to you.” Billy protested, and cringed at the denial in his voice, at the self-justification. Nausea crawled the walls of his stomach, but he clenched his teeth and strove for control. “Nothing smelled real about it,” Lanny said. “About what?” “The first note. It was a joke. It was a lame joke. There isn’t a cop alive with the instinct to smell anything real in it.” “Was she married?” Billy asked. A Toyota drove into the lot and parked seventy or eighty feet from the Explorer. In silence they watched the driver get out of the car and go into the tavern. At such a distance, their conversation couldn’t have been overheard. Nevertheless, they were circumspect. Country music drifted out of the tavern while the door was open. On the jukebox, Alan Jackson was singing about heartbreak. “Was she married?” Billy asked again. “Who?” “The woman. The schoolteacher. Giselle Winslow.” “I don’t think so, no. At least there’s no husband in the picture at the moment. Let me see the note.” Withholding the folded paper, Billy said, “Did she have any children?” “What does it matter?” “It matters,” Billy said. He realized that his empty hand had tightened into a fist. This was a friend standing before him, such as he allowed himself friends. Yet he relaxed his fist only with effort.

“It matters to me, Lanny.” “Kids? I don’t know. Probably not. From what I heard, she must have lived alone.” Two bursts of traffic passed on the state highway: paradiddles of engines, the soft percussion of displaced air. In the ensuing quiet, Lanny said plaintively, “Listen, Billy, potentially, I’m in trouble here.” “Potentially?” He found humor in that choice of words, but not the kind to make him laugh. “No one else in the department would have taken that damn note seriously. But they’ll say I should have.” “Maybe I should have,” Billy said. Agitated, Lanny disagreed: “That’s hindsight. Bullshit. Don’t talk like that. We need a mutual defense.” “Defense against what?” “Whatever. Billy, listen, I don’t have a perfect ten card.” “What’s a ten card?” “My force record card, my performance file. I’ve gotten a couple negative reports.” “What’d you do?” Lanny’s eyes squinted when he took offense. “Damn it, I’m not a crooked cop.” “I didn’t say you were.” “I’m forty-six, never taken a dime of dirty money, and I never will.” “All right. Okay.” “I didn’t do anything.” Lanny’s pique might have been pretense; he couldn’t sustain it. Or perhaps some grim mind’s-eye image scared him, for his pinched eyes widened. He chewed on his lower lip as if gnawing on a disturbing thought

that he wanted to bite up, spit out, and never again consider. Although he glanced at his wristwatch, Billy waited. “What’s true enough,” Lanny said, “is I’m sometimes a lazy cop. Out of boredom, you know. And maybe because… I never really wanted this life.” “You don’t owe me any explanations,” Billy assured him. “I know. But the thing is… whether I wanted this life or not, it’s what I’ve got now. It’s all I have. I want a chance to keep it. I gotta read that new note, Billy. Please give me the note.” Sympathetic but unwilling to yield the paper, which was now damp with his own perspiration, Billy unfolded and read it. If you don’t go to the police and get them involved, I will kill an unmarried man who won’t much be missed by the world. If you do go to the police, I will kill a young mother of two. You have five hours to decide. The choice is yours. On the first reading, Billy comprehended every terrible detail of the note, yet he read it again. Then he relinquished it. Anxiety, the rust of life, corroded Lanny Olsen’s face as he scanned the lines. “This is one sick son of a bitch.” “I’ve got to go down to Napa.” “Why?” “To give both these notes to the police.” “Wait, wait, wait,” Lanny said. “You don’t know that the second victim’s going to be in Napa. Could be in St. Helena or Rutherford—” “Or in Angwin,” Billy interrupted, “or Calistoga.” Eager to press the point, Lanny said, “Or Yountville or Circle Oaks, or Oakville. You don’t know where. You don’t know anything.” “I know some things,” Billy said. “I know what’s right.” Blinking at the note, flicking sweat off his eyelashes, Lanny said, “Real killers don’t play these games.” “This one does.” Folding the note and tucking it in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt,

Lanny pleaded, “Let me think a minute.” Immediately retrieving the paper from Lanny’s pocket, Billy said, “Think all you want. I’m driving down to Napa.” “Oh, man, this is bad. This is wrong. Don’t be stupid.” “It’s the end of his game if I won’t play it.” “So you’re just going to kill a young mother of two. Just like that, are you?” “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.” “Then I’ll say it again. You’re going to kill a young mother of two.” Billy shook his head. “I’m not killing anyone.” “ ‘The choice is yours,’” Lanny quoted. “Are you going to choose to make two orphans?” What Billy saw now in his friend’s face, in his eyes, was not anything that he had seen before across a poker table or anywhere else. He seemed to be confronted by a stranger. “The choice is yours,” Lanny repeated. Billy didn’t want a falling-out between them. He lived on the more companionable side of the line between recluse and hermit, and he did not want to find himself straddling that divide. Perhaps sensing his friend’s concern, Lanny took a softer tack: “All I’m asking is throw me a line. I’m in quicksand here.” “For God’s sake, Lanny.” “I know. It sucks. There’s no way it doesn’t.” “Don’t try to manipulate me like that again. Don’t hammer me.” “I won’t. I’m sorry. It’s just, the sheriff’s a hardass. You know he is. With my ten card, this is all he needs to take my badge, and I’m still six years short of a full pension.” As long as he met Lanny’s eyes and saw the desperation in them, and saw something worse than desperation that he didn’t want to name, he

couldn’t compromise with him. He had to look away and pretend to be speaking to the Lanny he’d known before this encounter. “What are you asking me to do?” Reading capitulation in the question, Lanny spoke in a still more conciliatory voice. “You won’t regret this, Billy. It’s going to be all right.” “I didn’t say I’d do whatever you want. I just need to know what it is.” “I understand. I appreciate it. You’re a true friend. All I’m asking is an hour, one hour to think.” Shifting his gaze from the tavern to the cracked blacktop at his feet, Billy said, “There’s not much time. With the first message, it was six hours. Now it’s five.” “I’m only asking for one. One hour.” “He must know I get off work at seven, so that’s probably when the clock starts ticking. Midnight. Then before dawn he kills one or the other, and by action or inaction, I’ve made a choice. He’ll do what he’ll do, but I don’t want to think I decided it for him.” “One hour,” Lanny promised, “and then I’ll go to Sheriff Palmer. I just have to figure the approach, the angle that’ll save my ass.” A familiar shriek, but seldom heard in this territory, raised Billy’s attention from the blacktop to the sky. White on sapphire, three sea gulls kited against the eastern heavens. They rarely ventured this far north from San Pablo Bay. “Billy, I need those notes for Sheriff Palmer.” Watching the sea gulls, Billy said, “I’d rather keep them.” “The notes are evidence,” Lanny said plaintively. “That bastard Palmer will rip me a new one if I don’t take custody of the evidence and protect it.” As the summer evening waned toward the darkness that always drove gulls to seaside roosts, these birds were so out of place that they seemed to be an omen. Their piercing, cold cries brought a creeping chill to the nape of Billy’s neck. He said, “I only have the note I just found.”

“Where’s the first one?” Lanny asked. “I left it in my kitchen, by the phone.” Billy considered going into the tavern to ask Ivy Elgin the meaning of the birds. “All right. Okay,” Lanny said. “Just give me the one you’ve got. Palmer’s gonna want to come talk to you. We can get the first note then.” The problem was, Ivy claimed to be able to read portents only in the details of dead things. When Billy hesitated, Lanny grew insistent: “For God’s sake, look at me. What is it with the birds?” “I don’t know,” Billy replied. “You don’t know what?” “I don’t know what it is with the birds.” Reluctantly, Billy fished the note from his pocket and gave it to Lanny. “One hour.” “That’s all I need. I’ll call you.” As Lanny turned away, Billy put a hand on his shoulder, halting him. “What do you mean you’ll call? You said you’d bring Palmer.” “I’ll call you first, as soon as I’ve figured out how to tweak the story to give myself cover.” “ ‘Tweak,’” Billy said, loathing the word. Falling silent, the circling sea gulls wheeled away toward the westering sun. “When I call,” Lanny said, “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna tell Palmer, so we’ll be on the same page. Then I’ll go to him.” Billy wished that he had never surrendered the note. But it was evidence, and logic dictated that Lanny should have it. “Where are you going to be in an hour—at Whispering Pines?” Billy shook his head. “I’m stopping there, but only for fifteen minutes. Then I’m going home. Call me at my place. But there’s one more thing.”

Impatiently, Lanny said, “Midnight, Billy. Remember?” “How does this psycho know what choice I make? How did he know I went to you and not to the police? How will he know what I do in the next four and a half hours?” No answer but a frown occurred to Lanny. “Unless,” Billy said, “he’s watching me.” Surveying the vehicles in the parking lot, the tavern, and the arc of embracing elms, Lanny said, “Everything was going so smooth.” “Was it?” “Like a river. Now this rock.” “Always a rock.” “That’s true enough,” Lanny said, and walked away toward his patrol car. Mother Olsen’s only child appeared defeated, slump-shouldered and baggyassed. Billy wanted to ask if everything was all right between them, but that was too direct. He couldn’t think of another way to phrase the question. Then he heard himself say, “Something I’ve never told you and should have.” Lanny stopped, looked back, regarding him warily. “All those years your mom was sick and you looked after her, gave up what you wanted… that took more of the right stuff than cop work does.” As though embarrassed, Lanny looked at the trees again and said almost as if discomfited, “Thanks, Billy.” He seemed genuinely touched to hear his sacrifice acknowledged. Then as if a perverse sense of shame compelled him to discount, if not mock, his virtue, Lanny added, “But all of that doesn’t leave me with a pension.” Billy watched him get in the car and drive away.

In a silence of vanished sea gulls, the breathless day waned, while the hills and the meadows and the trees gradually drew more shadows over themselves. On the farther side of the highway, the forty-foot wooden man strove to save himself from the great grinding wheels of industry or brutal ideology, or modern art.

Chapter 7 Barbara’s face against the dimpled background of the pillow was Billy’s despair and his hope, his loss and his expectation. She was an anchor in two senses, the first beneficial. The sight of her held Billy fast and stable whatever the currents of a day. Less mercifully, every memory of her from the time when she had been not just in the quick of life, but also vivacious, was a link of chain enwrapping him. If she sank from coma into full oblivion, the chain would pull taut, and he would sink with her into the darkest waters. He came here not only to keep her company in the hope that she would recognize his presence even in her internal prison, but also to be taught how to care and not to care, how to sit still, and perhaps to find elusive peace. This evening, peace was more elusive than usual. His attention shifted often from her face to his watch, and to the window beyond which the acid-yellow day soured slowly toward a bitter twilight. He held his little notebook. He paged through it, reading the mysterious words that she had spoken. When he found a sequence that particularly intrigued him, he read it aloud:

“—soft black drizzle—” “—death of the sun—” “—the scarecrow of a suit—” “—livers of fat geese—” “—narrow street, high houses—” “—a cistern to hold the fog—” “—strange forms… ghostly motion—” “—clear-sounding bells—” His hope was that, hearing her enigmatic coma-talk read back to her, she would be spurred to speak, perhaps to expand upon those utterances and make more sense of them… On other nights his performance had sometimes drawn a reply from her. But never did she clarify what previously she had said. Instead she delivered a new and different sequence of equally inscrutable words. This evening she responded with silence, and occasionally with a sigh uncolored by emotion, as if she were a machine that breathed in a shallow rhythm with louder exhalations caused by random power surges. After reading aloud two sequences, Billy returned the notebook to his pocket. Agitated, he had read her words with too much force, too much haste. At one point he’d heard himself and thought he sounded angry, which would do Barbara no good. He paced the room. The window drew him. Whispering Pines stood adjacent to a gently sloping vineyard. Beyond the window lay regimented vines with emerald-green leaves that would be crimson come autumn, with small hard grapes still many weeks from maturity. The work lanes between the vine rows were mottled black with the shadows of the day’s last hour, purple with grape pomace that had been spread as fertilizer.

Seventy or eighty feet from the window, a man alone stood in one of those lanes. He had no tools with him and did not appear to be at work. If he was a grower or a vintner out for a walk, he must not be in a hurry. He stood in one place, feet planted wide apart, hands in his trouser pockets. He seemed to be studying the convalescent home. From this distance and in this light, no details of the man’s appearance could be discerned. He stood in the lane between vines with his back to the declining sun, which revealed him only as a silhouette. Listening to running feet on hollow stairs, which was in fact the thunder of his heart, Billy warned himself against paranoia. Whatever trouble might come, he would need calm nerves and a clear mind to cope. He turned away from the window. He went to the bed. Barbara’s eyes moved under her lids. The specialists said this indicated a dream state. Considering that any coma was a far deeper sleep than mere sleep itself, Billy wondered if hers were more intense than ordinary dreams—full of fevered action, crashing with a thunderstorm of sound, drenched in color. He worried that her dreams were nightmares, vivid and perpetual. When he kissed her forehead, she murmured, “The wind is in the east” He waited, but she said no more, though her eyes darted and rolled from phantom to phantom under her closed lids. Because those words contained no menace and because no sense of peril darkened her voice, he chose to believe that her current dream, at least, must be benign. Although he didn’t want it, he took from the nightstand a square cream-colored envelope on which his name had been written in flowing script. He tucked it in a pocket, unread, for he knew that it had been left by Barbara’s doctor, Jordan Ferrier. When medical issues of substance needed to be discussed, the physician always used the telephone. He resorted to written messages only when he had turned from medicine to the devil’s work.

At the window again, Billy discovered that the watcher in the vineyard had gone. Moments later, when he left Whispering Pines, he half expected to find a third note on his windshield. He was spared that discovery. Most likely the man among the vines had been an ordinary man engaged in honest business. Nothing more. Nothing less. Billy drove directly home, parked in the detached garage, climbed the back-porch steps, and found his kitchen door unlocked, ajar.

Chapter 8 Billy had not been threatened in either of the notes. The danger confronting him was not to life and limb. He would have preferred physical peril to the moral jeopardy that he faced. Nevertheless, when he found the back door of the house ajar, he considered waiting in the yard until Lanny arrived with Sheriff Palmer. That option occupied his consideration only for a moment. He didn’t care if Lanny and Palmer thought he was gutless, but he didn’t want to think it of himself. He went inside. No one waited in the kitchen. The draining daylight drizzled down the windows more than it penetrated them. Warily, he turned on lights as he went through the house. He found no intruder in any room or closet. Curiously, he saw no signs of intrusion, either. By the time that he returned to the kitchen, he had begun to wonder if he might have failed to close and lock the door when he had left the house earlier in the day.

That possibility had to be discounted when he found the spare key on a kitchen counter, near the phone. It should have been taped to the bottom of one of twenty cans of wood stain and varnish stored on a shelf in the garage. Billy had last used the spare key five or six months previously. He could not possibly have been under surveillance that long. Suspecting the existence of a key, the killer must have intuited that the garage was the most likely place in which it would have been hidden. Billy’s professionally equipped woodworking shop occupied two-thirds of that space, presenting numerous drawers and cabinets and shelves where such a small item could have been hidden. The search for it might have taken hours. If the killer, after visiting the house, intended to announce his intrusion by leaving the spare key in the kitchen, logic argued that he would have saved himself the time and trouble of the search. Instead, why wouldn’t he have broken one of the four panes of glass in the back door? As Billy puzzled over this conundrum, he suddenly realized that the key lay at the very spot on the black-granite counter where he had left the first typewritten message from the killer. It was gone. Turning in a full circle, he saw the note neither on the floor nor on another counter. He pulled open the nearest drawers, but it was not in this one or in this one, or in this one… Abruptly he realized that Giselle Winslow’s killer had not been here, after all. The intruder had been Lanny Olsen. Lanny knew where the spare key was kept. When he had asked for the first note, as evidence, Billy had told him that it was here, in the kitchen. Lanny had also asked where to find him in an hour, whether he would be going directly home or to Whispering Pines. A sense of deep misgiving overcame Billy, a general uneasiness and doubt that began to curdle his trust. If Lanny had all along intended to come here and collect the note as essential evidence, not later with Sheriff Palmer but right away, he should have said so. His deception suggested that he was not in a mood to serve and protect the public, or even to back up a friend, but was focused first on

saving his own skin. Billy didn’t want to believe such a thing. He sought excuses for Lanny. Maybe after driving away from the tavern in his patrol car, he had decided that, after all, he must have both of the notes before he approached Sheriff Palmer. And maybe he didn’t want to make a call to Whispering Pines because he knew how important those visits were to Billy. In that case, however, he would have written a brief explanation to leave in place of the killer’s note when he took it. Unless… If his intention was to destroy both notes instead of going to Palmer, and later to claim that Billy had never come to him prior to the Winslow murder, such a replacement note would have been evidence to refute him. Always, Lanny Olsen had seemed to be a good man, not free of faults, but basically good and fair and decent. He’d sacrificed his dreams to stand by his ailing mother for so many years. Billy dropped the spare key in his pants pocket. He did not intend to tape it again to the bottom of the can in the workshop. He wondered just how many bad reports were on Lanny’s ten card, exactly how lazy he had been. In retrospect, Billy heard markedly greater desperation in his friend’s voice than he had heard at the time: I never really wanted this life… but the thing is… whether I wanted it or not, it’s what I’ve got now. It’s all I have. I want a chance to keep it. Even most good men had a breaking point. Lanny might have been closer to his than Billy could have known. The wall clock showed 8:09. In less than four hours, regardless of the choice that Billy made, someone would die. He wanted this responsibility off his shoulders. Lanny was supposed to call him by 8:30. Billy had no intention of waiting. He snatched the handset from the wall phone and keyed in Lanny’s personal cell-phone number.

After five rings, he was switched to voice mail. He said, “This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now.” Instinct told him not to attempt to reach Lanny through the sheriffs-department dispatcher. He would be leaving a trail that might have consequences he could not foresee. His friend’s betrayal, if that’s what it was, had reduced Billy to the cautious calculations of a guilty man, although he had done nothing wrong. A transient sting of mingled pain and anger would have been understandable. Instead, resentment swelled in him so thick, so quick, that his chest grew tight and he had difficulty swallowing. Destroying the notes and lying about them might spare Lanny dismissal from the force, but Billy’s situation would be made worse. Lacking evidence, he would find it more difficult to convince the authorities that his story was true and that it might shed light on the killer’s psychology. If he approached them now, he risked looking like a publicity seeker or like a bartender who sampled too much of his wares. Or like a suspect. Riveted by that thought, he stood very still for a minute, exploring it. Suspect. His mouth had gone dry. His tongue cleaved to his palate. He went to the kitchen sink and drew a glass of cold water from the tap. At first he could barely choke down a mouthful, but then he drained the glass in three long swallows. Too cold, drunk too fast, the water wrung a brief sharp pain from his chest, and washed nausea through his gut. He put the glass on the drainboard. He leaned over the sink until the queasiness passed. He splashed his greasy face with cold water, washed his hands in hot. He paced the kitchen. He sat briefly at the table, then paced some more. At 8:30, he stood by the telephone, staring at it, although he had every reason to believe that it would not ring. At 8:40, he used his cell phone to call Lanny’s cellular number, leaving the house phone open. He got voice mail again.

The kitchen was too warm. He felt stifled. At 8:45, Billy stepped outside, onto the back porch. He needed fresh air. With the door wide open behind him, he could hear the telephone if it rang. Indigo in the east, the sky overhead and to the west trembled faintly with the iridescent vibrations of an orange-and-green sunset. The encircling woods bristled dark, growing darker. If a hostile observer had taken up position in that timber, crouching in ferns and philodendrons, none but a sharp-nosed dog could have known that he was out there. A hundred toads, all unseen, had begun to sing in the descending gloom, but in the kitchen, past the open door, all was silent. Perhaps Lanny just needed a little more time to find a way to tweak the truth. Surely he cared about more than himself. He could not have been reduced so totally, so quickly, to the most base self-interest. He was still a cop, lazy or not, desperate or not. Sooner than later he would realize that he couldn’t live with himself if, by obstructing the investigation, he contributed to more deaths. The ink-spill in the east soon saturated the sky overhead, while in the west, all was fire and blood.

Chapter 9 At 9:00, Billy left the back porch and went inside. He closed the door and locked it.

In just three hours, a fate would be decided, a death ordained, and if the killer followed a pattern, someone would be murdered before dawn. The key to the SUV lay on the dinette table. Billy picked it up. He considered setting out in search of Lanny Olsen. What he had thought was resentment, earlier, had been mere exasperation. Now he knew real resentment, a dark and bitter brooding. He badly wanted confrontation. Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain, and from the friend who has something to lose. Lanny had been on day shift. He was off duty now. Most likely he would be holed up at home. If he was not at home, there were only a handful of restaurants, bars, and friends’ houses where he might be found. A sense of responsibility and a strange despairing kind of hope held Billy prisoner in his kitchen, by his telephone. He no longer expected Lanny to call; but the killer might. The mute listener on the line the previous night had been Giselle Winslow’s murderer. Billy had no proof, but no doubt, either. Maybe he would call this evening, too. If Billy could speak to him, something might be accomplished, something learned. Billy was under no illusion that such a monster could be charmed into chattiness. Neither could a homicidal sociopath be debated, nor persuaded by reason to spare a life. Hearing the man speak a few words, however, might prove valuable. Ethnicity, region of origin, education, approximate age, and more could be inferred from a voice. With luck, the killer might also unwittingly reveal some salient fact about himself. One clue, one small bud of information that blossomed under determined analysis, could provide Billy with something credible to take to the police. Confronting Lanny Olsen might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not get Billy out of the box in which the killer had put him. He hung the key to the SUV on a pegboard.

The previous evening, in a nervous moment, he had lowered the shades at all the windows. This morning, before breakfast, he had raised those in the kitchen. Now he lowered them again. He stood in the center of the kitchen. He glanced at the phone. Intending to sit at the table, he put his right hand on the back of a chair, but he didn’t move it. He just stood there, studying the polished black-granite floor at his feet. He kept an immaculate house. The granite was glossy, spotless. The blackness under his feet appeared to have no substance, as if he were standing on air, high in the night itself, with five miles of atmosphere yawning below, wingless. He pulled the chair out from the table. He sat. Less than a minute passed before he got to his feet. Under these circumstances, Billy Wiles had no idea how to act, what to do. The simple task of passing time defeated him, although he had not been doing much else for years. Because he hadn’t eaten dinner, he went to the refrigerator. He had no appetite. Nothing on those cold shelves appealed to him. He glanced at the SUV key dangling on the pegboard. He went to the phone and stood staring at it. He sat at the table. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. After a while, he went to the study, where he spent so many evenings carving architectural ornaments at a corner worktable. He collected several tools and a chunk of white oak from which he had only half finished carving a cluster of acanthus leaves. He returned with them to the kitchen. The study had a telephone, but Billy preferred the kitchen this evening. The study also had a comfortable couch, and he worried that he would be tempted to lie down, that he would fall asleep and not be awakened by the killer’s call, or by anything, ever.

Whether or not this concern was realistic, he settled at the dinette table with the wood and the tools. Without a carver’s vise, he could work only on the finer details of the leaves, which was engraving work akin to scrimshaw. The blade scraped a hollow sound from the oak, as if this were bone, not wood. At ten minutes past ten o’clock, less than two hours before the deadline, he abruptly decided that he would go to the sheriff. His house was not in any township; the sheriff had jurisdiction here. The tavern lay in Vineyard Hills, but the town was too small to have its own police force; Sheriff Palmer was the law there, too. Billy snared the key from the pegboard, opened the door, stepped onto the back porch—and halted. If you do go to the police, I will kill a young mother of two. He didn’t want to choose. He didn’t want anyone to die. In all of Napa County, there might be dozens of young mothers with two children. Maybe a hundred, two hundred, maybe more. Even with five hours, they couldn’t have identified and alerted all the possible targets. They would have to use the media to warn the public. That might take days. Now, with less than two hours, nothing substantive would be done. They might spend longer than that just questioning Billy. The young mother, obviously preselected by the killer, would be murdered. What if the children awakened? As witnesses, they might be eliminated. The madman had not promised to kill only the mother. On damp night air, a musky smell wafted from the rich layers of mast on the woodland floor and drifted from the trees to the porch. Billy returned to the kitchen and closed the door. Later, whittling leaf details, he pricked a thumb. He didn’t get a Band-Aid. The puncture was small; it should close quickly. When he nicked a knuckle, he remained too intensely involved with the

carving to bother attending to it. He worked faster, and didn’t notice when he sustained a third tiny cut. To an observer, had there been one, it might have seemed as though Billy wanted to bleed. Because his hands remained busy, the wounds kept weeping. The wood soaked up the blood. In time, he realized that the oak had completely discolored. He dropped the carving and put aside the blade. He sat for a while, staring at his hands, breathing hard for no reason. In time, the bleeding stopped, and it didn’t start up again when he washed his hands at the sink. At 11:45, after patting his hands dry on a dishtowel, he got a cold Guinness and drank it from the bottle. He finished it too fast. Five minutes after the first beer, he opened a second. He poured it in a glass to encourage himself to sip it and make it last. He stood with the Guinness in front of the wall clock. Eleven-fifty. Countdown. As much as Billy wanted to lie to himself, he couldn’t be fooled. He had made a choice, all right. The choice is yours. Even inaction is a choice. The mother who had two children—she wouldn’t die tonight. If the homicidal freak kept his end of the bargain, the mother would sleep the night and see the dawn. Billy was part of it now. He could deny, he could run, he could leave his window shades down for the rest of his life and cross the line from recluse to hermit, but he could not escape the fundamental fact that he was part of it. The killer had offered him a partnership. He had wanted no part of it. But now it turned out to be like one of those business deals, one of those aggressive stock offers, that writers in the financial pages called a hostile takeover. He finished the second Guinness as midnight arrived. He wanted a third. And a fourth.

He told himself he needed to keep a clear head. He asked himself why, and he had no credible answer. His part of the business was done for the night. He had made the choice. The freak would do the deed. Nothing more would happen tonight, except that without the beer, Billy wouldn’t be able to sleep. He might find himself carving again. His hands ached. Not from his three insignificant wounds. From having clutched the tools too tightly. From having held the chunk of oak in a death grip. Without sleep, he wouldn’t be ready for the day ahead. With morning would come news of another corpse. He would learn whom he had chosen for death. Billy put his glass in the sink. He didn’t need a glass anymore because he didn’t care about making the beer last. Each bottle was a punch, and he wanted nothing more than to knock himself out. He took a third beer to the living room and sat in his recliner. He drank in the dark. Emotional fatigue can be as debilitating as physical exhaustion. All strength had fled him. At 1:44, the telephone woke him. He flew up from the chair as if from a catapult. The empty beer bottle rolled across the floor. Hoping to hear Lanny, he snared the handset from the kitchen phone on the fourth ring. “Hello” earned no reply. The listener. The freak. Billy knew from experience that a strategy of silence would get him nowhere. “What do you want from me? Why me?” The caller did not respond. “I’m not going to play your game,” Billy said, but that was lame because they both knew that he had already been co-opted. He would have been pleased if the killer had replied with even a soft laugh of derision, but he got nothing.

“You’re sick, you’re twisted.” When that didn’t inspire a response, Billy added, “You’re human debris.” He thought he sounded weak and ineffective, and for the times in which he lived, the insults were far from inflammatory. Some heavy-metal rock band probably called itself Sick and Twisted, and surely another was named Human Debris. The freak would not be baited. He disconnected. Billy hung up and realized that his hands were trembling. His palms were damp, too, and he blotted them on his shirt. He was struck by a thought that should have but hadn’t occurred to him when the killer had called the previous night. He returned to the phone, picked up the handset, listened to the dial tone for a moment, and then keyed in * 69, instigating an automatic callback. At the farther end of the line, the phone rang, rang, rang, but nobody answered it. The number in the digital display on Billy’s phone, however, was familiar to him. It was Lanny’s.

Chapter 10 Graceful in starlight with oaks, the church stood along the main highway, a quarter of a mile from the turnoff to Lanny Olsen’s house. Billy drove to the southwest corner of the parking lot. Under the cloaking gloom of a massive California live oak, he doused the headlights and switched off the engine. Picturesque chalk-white stucco walls with decorative buttresses rose to burnt-orange tile roofs. In a belfry niche stood a statue of the Holy Mother with her arms open to welcome suffering humanity.

Here, every baptized baby would seem to be a potential saint. Here, every marriage would appear to have the promise of lifelong happiness regardless of the natures of the bride and groom. Billy had a gun, of course. Although it was an old weapon, not one of recent purchase, it remained in working order. He had cleaned and stored it properly. Packed away with the revolver had been a box of .38 cartridges. They showed no signs of corrosion. When he had taken the weapon from its storage case, it felt heavier than he remembered. Now as he picked it off the passenger’s seat, it still felt heavy. This particular Smith and Wesson tipped the scale at only thirty-six ounces, but maybe the extra weight that he felt was its history. He got out of the Explorer and locked the doors. A lone car passed on the highway. The sidewash of the headlights reached no closer than thirty yards from Billy. The rectory lay on the farther side of the church. Even if the priest was an insomniac, he would not have heard the SUV. Billy walked farther under the oak, out from its canopy, into a meadow. Wild grass rose to his knees. In the spring, cascades of poppies had spilled down this sloped field, as orange-red as a lava flow. They were dead now, and gone. He halted to let his eyes grow accustomed to the moonless dark. Motionless, he listened. The air was still. No traffic moved on the distant highway. His presence had silenced the cicadas and the toads. He could almost hear the stars. Confident of his dark-adapted vision though of nothing else, he set out across the gently rising meadow, angling toward the fissured and potholed blacktop lane that led to Lanny Olsen’s place. He worried about rattlesnakes. On summer nights as warm as this, they hunted field mice and younger rabbits. Unbitten, he reached the lane and

turned uphill, passing two houses, both dark and silent. At the second house, a dog ran loose in the fenced yard. It did not bark, but raced back and forth along the high pickets, whimpering for Billy’s attention. Lanny’s place lay a third of a mile past the house with the dog. At every window, light of one quality or another fired the glass or gilded the curtains. In the yard, Billy crouched beside a plum tree. He could see the west face of the house, which was the front, and the north flank. The possibility existed that this entire thing had in fact been a hoax and that Lanny was the hoaxer. Billy did not know for a fact that a blond schoolteacher had been murdered in the city of Napa. He had taken Lanny’s word for it. He had not seen a report of the homicide in the newspaper. The killing supposedly had been discovered too late in the day to make the most recent edition. Besides, he rarely read a newspaper. Likewise, he never watched TV. Occasionally he listened for weather reports on the radio, while driving, but mostly he relied on a CD player loaded with zydeco or Western swing. A cartoonist might be expected also to be a prankster. The funny streak in Lanny had been repressed for so long, however, that it was less of a streak than a thread. He made reasonably good company, but he wasn’t a load of laughs. Billy didn’t intend to wager his life—or a nickel—that Lanny Olsen had hoaxed him. He remembered how sweaty and anxious and distressed his friend had been in the tavern parking lot, the previous evening. In Lanny, what you saw was what he was. If he’d wanted to be an actor instead of a cartoonist, and if his mother had never gotten cancer, he would still have wound up as a cop with a problematic ten card. After studying the place, certain that no one was watching from a window, Billy crossed the lawn, passed the front porch, and had a look at the south flank of the house. There, too, every window glowed softly. He circled to the rear, staying at a distance, and saw that the back door

stood open. A wedge of light lay like a carpet on the dark porch floor, welcoming visitors across the kitchen threshold. An invitation this bold seemed to suggest a trap. Billy expected to find Lanny Olsen dead inside. If you don’t go to the police and get them involved, I will kill an unmarried man who won’t much be missed by the world. Lanny’s funeral would not be attended by thousands of mourners, perhaps not even by as many as a hundred, though some would miss him. Not the world, but some. When Billy had made his choice to spare the mother of two, he had not realized that he had doomed Lanny. If he had known, perhaps he would have made a different choice. Choosing the death of a friend would be harder than dropping the dime on a nameless stranger. Even if the stranger was a mother of two. He didn’t want to think about that. Toward the end of the backyard stood the stump of a diseased oak that had been cut down long ago. Four feet across, two feet high. On the east side of the stump was a hole worn by weather and rot. In the hole had been tucked a One Zip plastic bag. The bag contained a spare house key. After retrieving the key, Billy circled cautiously to the front of the house. He returned to the concealment of the plum tree. No one had turned off any lights. No face could be seen at any window; and none of the curtains moved suspiciously. A part of him wanted to phone 911, get help here fast, and spill the story. He suspected that would be a reckless move. He didn’t understand the rules of this bizarre game and could not know how the killer denned winning. Perhaps the freak would find it amusing to frame an innocent bartender for both murders. Billy had survived being a suspect once. The experience reshaped him. Profoundly.

He would resist being reshaped again. He had lost too much of himself the first time. He left the cover of the plum tree. He quietly climbed the front-porch steps and went directly to the door. The key worked. The hardware didn’t rattle, the hinges didn’t squeak, and the door opened silently.

Chapter 11 This Victorian house had a Victorian foyer with a dark wood floor. A wood-paneled hall led toward the back of the house, and a staircase offered the upstairs. On one wall had been taped an eight-by-ten sheet of paper on which had been drawn a hand. It looked like Mickey Mouse’s hand: a plump thumb, three fingers, and a wrist roll suggestive of a glove. Two fingers were folded back against the palm. The thumb and forefinger formed a cocked gun that pointed to the stairs. Billy got the message, all right, but he chose to ignore it for the time being. He left the front door open in case he needed to make a quick exit. Holding the revolver with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling, he stepped through an archway to the left of the foyer. The living room looked as it had when Mrs. Olsen had been alive, ten years ago. Lanny didn’t use it much. The same was true of the dining room. Lanny ate most of his meals in the kitchen or in the den while watching TV. In the hallway, taped to the wall, another cartoon hand pointed toward the foyer and the stairs, opposite from the direction in which he was proceeding.

Although the TV was dark in the den, flames fluttered in the gas-log fireplace, and in a bed of faux ashes, false embers glowed as if real. On the kitchen table stood a bottle of Bacardi, a double-liter plastic jug of Coca-Cola, and an ice bucket. On a plate beside the Coke gleamed a small knife with a serrated blade and a lime from which a few slices had been carved. Beside the plate stood a tall, sweating glass half full of a dark concoction. In the glass floated a slice of lime and a few thin slivers of melting ice. After stealing the killer’s first note from Billy’s kitchen and destroying it with the second to save his job and his hope of a pension, Lanny had tried to drown his guilt with a series of rum and Cokes. If the jug of Coca-Cola and the bottle of Bacardi had been full when he sat down to the task, he had made considerable progress toward a state of drunkenness sufficient to shroud memory and numb the conscience until morning. The pantry door was closed. Although Billy doubted that the freak lurked in there among the canned goods, he wouldn’t feel comfortable turning his back on it until he investigated. With his right arm tucked close to his side and the revolver aimed in front of him, he turned the knob fast and pulled the door with his left hand. No one waited in the pantry. From a kitchen drawer, Billy removed a clean dishtowel. After wiping the metal drawer-pull and the knob on the pantry door, he tucked one end of the cloth under his belt and let it hang from his side in the manner of a bar rag. On a counter near the cooktop lay Lanny’s wallet, car keys, pocket change, and cell phone. Here, too, was his 9-mm service pistol with the Wilson Combat holster in which he carried it. Billy picked up the cell phone, switched it on, and summoned voice mail. The only message in storage was the one that he himself had left for Lanny earlier in the evening. This is Billy. I’m at home. What the hell? What’ve you done? Call me now. After listening to his own voice, he deleted the message.

Maybe that was a mistake, but he didn’t see any way that it could prove his innocence. On the contrary, it would establish that he had expected to see Lanny during the evening just past and that he had been angry with him. Which would make him a suspect. He had brooded about the voice mail during the drive to the church parking lot and during the walk through the meadow. Deleting it seemed the wisest course if he found what he expected to find on the second floor. He switched off the cell phone and used the dishtowel to wipe it clean of prints. He returned it to the counter where he had found it. If someone had been watching right then, he would have figured Billy for a calm, cool piece of work. In truth, he was half sick with dread and anxiety. An observer might also have thought that Billy, judging by his meticulous attention to detail, had covered up crimes before. That wasn’t the case, but brutal experience had sharpened his imagination and had taught him the dangers of circumstantial evidence. An hour previously, at 1:44, the killer had rung Billy from this house. The phone company would have a record of that brief call. Perhaps the police would think it proved Billy couldn’t have been here at the time of the murder. More likely, they would suspect that Billy himself had placed the call to an accomplice at his house for the misguided purpose of trying to establish his presence elsewhere at the time of the murder. Cops always suspected the worst of everyone. Their experience had taught them to do so. At the moment, he couldn’t think of anything to be done about the phone-company records. He put it out of his mind. More urgent matters required his attention. Like finding the corpse, if one existed. He didn’t think he should waste time searching for the killer’s two notes. If they were still intact, he would most likely have found them on the table at which Lanny had been drinking or on the counter with his wallet, pocket change, and cell phone.

The flames in the den fireplace, on this warm summer night, led to a logical conclusion about the notes. Taped to the side of a kitchen cabinet was a cartoon hand that pointed to the swinging door and the downstairs hallway. At last Billy was willing to take direction, but a shrinking, anxious fear immobilized him. Possession of a firearm and the will to use it did not give him sufficient courage to proceed at once. He did not expect to encounter the freak. In some ways the killer would have been less intimidating than what he did expect to find. The bottle of rum tempted him. He had felt no effect from the three bottles of Guinness. His heart had been thundering for most of an hour, his metabolism racing. For a man who was not much of a drinker, he’d recently had to remind himself of that fact often enough to suggest that a potential rummy lived inside him, yearning to be free. The courage to proceed came from a fear of failing to proceed and from an acute awareness of the consequences of surrendering this hand of cards to the freak. He left the kitchen and followed the hall to the foyer. At least the stairs were not dark; there was light here below, at the landing, and at the top. Ascending, he did not bother calling Lanny’s name. He knew that he would receive no answer, and he doubted that he could have found his voice anyway.

Chapter 12 Opening off the upper hallway were three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a closet. Four of those five doors were closed.

On both sides of the entrance to the master bedroom were cartoon hands pointing to that open door. Reluctant to be herded, thinking of animals driven up a ramp at a slaughterhouse, Billy left the master bedroom for last. He first checked the hall bath. Then the closet and the two other bedrooms, in one of which Lanny kept a drawing table. Using the dishtowel, he wiped all the doorknobs after he touched them. With only the one space remaining to be searched, he stood in the hall, listening. No pin dropped. Something had stuck in his throat, and he couldn’t swallow it. He couldn’t swallow it because it was no more real than the sliver of ice sliding down the small of his back. He entered the master bedroom, where two lamps glowed. The rose-patterned wallpaper chosen by Lanny’s mother had not been removed after she died and not even, a few years later, after Lanny moved out of his old room into this one. Age had darkened the background to a pleasing shade reminiscent of a light tea stain. The bedspread had been one of Pearl Olsen’s favorites: rose in color overall, with embroidered flowers along the borders. Often during Mrs. Olsen’s illness, following chemotherapy sessions, and after her debilitating radiation treatments, Billy had sat with her in this room. Sometimes he just talked to her or watched her sleep. Often he read to her. She had liked swashbuckling adventure stories. Stories set during the Raj in India. Stories with geishas and samurai and Chinese warlords and Caribbean pirates. Pearl was gone, and now so was Lanny. Dressed in his uniform, he sat in an armchair, legs propped on a footstool, but he was gone just the same. He had been shot in the forehead. Billy didn’t want to see this. He dreaded having this image in his memory. He wanted to leave. Running, however, was not an option. It never had been, neither twenty years ago nor now, nor any time between. If he ran, he would be chased down and destroyed. The hunt was on, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was the ultimate game. Speed of flight would not save him. Speed never saved the fox. To escape the hounds and the hunters, the fox needed cunning and a taste for risk. Billy didn’t feel like a fox. He felt like a rabbit, but he would not run like one. The lack of blood on Lanny’s face, the lack of leakage from the wound suggested two things: that death had been instantaneous and that the back of his skull had been blown out.

No bloodstains or brain matter soiled the wallpaper behind the chair. Lanny had not been drilled as he sat there, had not been shot anywhere in this room. As Billy had not found blood elsewhere in the house, he assumed that the killing occurred outside. Perhaps Lanny had gotten up from the kitchen table, from his rum and Coke, half drunk or drunk, needing fresh air, and had stepped outside. Maybe he realized that his aim wouldn’t be neat enough for the bathroom and therefore went into the backyard to relieve himself. The freak must have used a plastic tarp or something to move the corpse through the house without making a mess. Even if the killer was strong, getting the dead man from the backyard to the master bedroom, considering the stairs, would have been a hard job. Hard and seemingly unnecessary. To have done it, however, he must have had a reason that was important to him. Lanny’s eyes were open. Both bulged slightly in their sockets. The left one was askew, as if he’d had a cast eye in life. Pressure. For the instant during which the bullet had transited the brain, pressure inside the skull soared before being relieved. A book-club novel lay in Lanny’s lap, a smaller and more cheaply produced volume than the handsome edition of the same title that had been available in bookstores. At least two hundred similar books were shelved at one end of the bedroom. Billy could see the title, the author’s name, and the jacket illustration. The story was about a search for treasure and true love in the South Pacific. A long time ago, he had read this novel to Pearl Olsen. She had liked it, but then she had liked them all. Lanny’s slack right hand rested on the book. He appeared to have marked his place with a photograph, a small portion of which protruded from the pages. The psychopath had arranged all of this. The tableau satisfied him and had emotional meaning to him, or it was a message—a riddle, a taunt.

Before disturbing the scene, Billy studied it. Nothing about it seemed compelling or clever, nothing that might have excited the murderer enough to motivate him to put forth such effort in its creation. Billy mourned Lanny; but with a greater passion, he hated that Lanny had been afforded no dignity even in death. The freak dragged him around and staged him as if he were a mannequin, a doll, as if he had existed only for the creep’s amusement and manipulation. Lanny had betrayed Billy; but that didn’t matter anymore. On the edge of the Dark, on the brink of the Void, few offenses were worth remembering. The only things worth recalling were the moments of friendship and laughter. If they had been at odds on Lanny’s last day, they were on the same team now, with the same and singular adversary. Billy thought he heard a noise in the hall. Without hesitation, holding the revolver in both hands, he left the master bedroom, clearing the doorway fast, sweeping the .38 left to right, seeking a target. No one. The bathroom, closet, and other bedroom doors were closed, as he had left them. He didn’t feel a pressing need to search those rooms again. He might have heard nothing but an ordinary settling noise as the old house protested the weight of time, but it almost certainly had not been the sound of a door opening or closing. He blotted the damp palm of his left hand on his shirt, switched the gun to it, blotted his right hand, returned the gun to it, and went to the head of the stairs. From the lower floor, from the porch beyond the open front door, came nothing but a summer-night silence, a dead-of-night hush.

Chapter 13 As he stood at the head of the stairs, listening, pain had begun to throb in Billy’s temples. He realized that his teeth were clenched tighter than the jaws of a vise. He tried to relax and breathe through his mouth. He rolled his head from side to side, working the stiffening muscles of his neck. Stress could be beneficial if you used it to stay focused and alert. Fear could paralyze, but also sharpen the survival instinct. He returned to the master bedroom. Approaching the door, he suddenly thought body and book would be gone. But Lanny still sat in the armchair. From a tissue box on one of the nightstands, Billy plucked two Kleenex. Using them as an impromptu glove, he moved the dead man’s hand off the book. Leaving the book on the cadaver’s lap, he opened it to the place that had been marked by the photograph. He expected sentences or paragraphs to have been highlighted in some fashion: a further message. But the text was pristine. Still using the Kleenex, he picked up the photo, a snapshot. She was young and blond and pretty. Nothing in the picture gave a clue to her profession, but Billy knew that she had been a teacher. Her killer must have found this snapshot in her house, down in Napa. Before or after finding it, he brutally beat the beauty out of her. No doubt the freak had left the photograph in the book to confirm for the authorities that the two murders had been the work of the same man. He was bragging. He wanted the credit that he had earned. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility… The freak hadn’t learned that lesson. Perhaps his failure to learn it would lead to his fall. If it was possible to feel genuinely heartbroken over the fate of a stranger, the photo of this young woman would have done the job had Billy stared at it too long. He returned it to the book and closed it in the yellowing pages. After putting the dead man’s hand atop the book, as it had been, he wadded the two Kleenex in his fist. He went into the bathroom that was part of the master suite, pushed the plunger with the Kleenex, and then dropped them into the whirling water in the toilet bowl.

In the bedroom, he stood beside the armchair, not sure what he should do. Lanny did not deserve to be left here alone without benefit of prayer or justice. If not a close friend, he had nevertheless been a friend. Besides, he was Pearl Olsen’s son, and that ought to count for a lot. Yet to phone the sheriff’s department, even anonymously, and report the crime might be a mistake. They would want an explanation for the call that had been placed from this house to Billy’s place soon after the murder; and he still had not decided what to tell them. Other issues, things he didn’t know about, might point the finger of suspicion at him. Circumstantial evidence. Perhaps the ultimate intention of the killer was to frame Billy for these murders and for others. Undeniably, the freak saw this as a game. The rules, if any, were known only to him. Likewise, the definition of victory was known only to him. Ginning the pot, capturing the king, scoring the final touchdown might mean, in this case, sending Billy to prison for life not for any rational reason, not so the freak himself could escape justice, but for the sheer fun of it. Considering that he could not even discern the shape of the playing field, Billy didn’t relish being interrogated by Sheriff John palmer. He needed time to think. A few hours at least. Until dawn. “I’m sorry,” he told Lanny. He switched off one of the bedside lamps and then the other. If the house glowed like a centenarian’s birthday cake through the night, someone might notice. And wonder. Everyone knew Lanny Olsen was an early-to-bed guy. The house stood at the highest and loneliest point of the deadend lane. Virtually no one drove up here unless they were coming to see Lanny, and no one was likely to visit during the next eight or ten hours. Midnight had turned Tuesday to Wednesday. Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off. No one would miss him at work until Friday. Nevertheless, one by one, Billy returned to the other upstairs rooms and

switched off those lights as well. He doused the hall lights and went down the stairs, uneasy about all the darkness at his back. In the kitchen, he closed the door to the porch and locked it. He intended to take Lanny’s spare key with him. As he went forward once more through the first floor, he turned off all the lights, including the ceramic gas-fueled logs in the den fireplace, using the barrel of the handgun to flip the switches. Standing on the front porch, he locked that door as well, and wiped the knob. He felt watched as he descended the steps. He surveyed the lawn, the trees, glanced back at the house. All the windows were black, and the night was black, and Billy walked away from that closed darkness into an open darkness under an India-ink sky in which stars seemed to float, seemed to tremble.

Chapter 14 He walked briskly downhill along the shoulder of the lane, ready to take cover in the roadside brush if headlights appeared. Frequently, he glanced back. As far as he could tell, no one followed him. Moonless, the night favored a stalker. It should have favored Billy, too, but he felt exposed by the stars. At the house with the chest-high fence, the half-seen dog once more raced back and forth along the pickets, beseeching Billy with a whimper. It sounded desperate.

He sympathized with the animal and understood its condition. His plight, however, and his need to plan left him no time to stop and console the beast. Besides, every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth. So he continued down the lane, and glanced behind, and held tight to the revolver, and then turned left into the meadow where he waded through the grass in a fear of snakes. One question pressed upon him more urgently than others: Was the killer someone he knew or a stranger? If the freak had been in Billy’s life well prior to the first note, a secret sociopath who could no longer keep his homicidal urges bottled up, identifying him might be difficult but possible. Analysis of relationships and a search of memory with an eye for anomaly might unearth clues. Deductive reasoning and imagination would likely paint a face, spell out a twisted motive. In the event that the freak was a stranger who selected Billy at random for torment and eventual destruction, detective work would be more difficult. Imagining a face never seen and sounding for a motive in a vacuum would not prove easy. Not long ago in the history of the world, routine daily violence—excluding the ravages of nations at war—had been largely personal in nature. Grudges, slights to honor, adultery, disputes over money triggered the murderous impulse. In the modern world, more in the postmodern, most of all in the post-postmodern, much violence had become impersonal. Terrorists, street gangs, lone sociopaths, sociopaths in groups and pledged to a Utopian vision killed people they did not know, against whom they had no realistic complaint, for the purpose of attracting attention, making a statement, intimidation, or even just for the thrill of it. The freak, whether known or unknown to Billy, was a daunting adversary. Judging by all evidence, he was bold but not reckless, psychopathic but self-controlled, clever, ingenious, cunning, with a baroque and Machiavellian mind. By contrast, Billy Wiles made his way in the world as plainly and

directly as he could. His mind was not baroque. His desires were not complex. He only hoped to live, and lived on guarded hope. Hurrying through tall pale grass that lashed against his legs and seemed to pass conspiratorial whispers blade to blade, he felt that he had more in common with a field mouse than with a sharp-beaked owl. The great spreading oak tree loomed. As Billy passed under it, unseen presences stirred in the boughs overhead, testing pinions, but no wings took flight. Beyond the Ford Explorer, the church looked like an ice carving made of water with a trace of phosphorus. Approaching, he unlocked the SUV with the remote key, and was acknowledged by two electronic chirps and a double flash of the parking lights. He got in, closed the door, and locked up again. He dropped the revolver on the passenger’s seat. When he attempted to insert the key in the ignition, something foiled him. A folded piece of paper had been fixed to the steering column with a short length of tape. A note. The third note. The killer must have been stationed along the highway, observing the turnoff to Lanny Olsen’s place, to see if Billy would take the bait. He must have noticed the Explorer pull into this parking lot. The vehicle had been locked. The freak could have gotten into it only by breaking a window; but none was broken. The car alarm had not been triggered. Thus far, every moment of this waking nightmare had felt keenly real, as veritable as fire to a testing hand. But the discovery of this third note seemed to thrust Billy through a membrane from the true world into one of fantasy. With a dreamlike dread, Billy peeled the note off the steering column. He unfolded it.

The interior lights, activated automatically when he boarded the SUV, were still on, for he had so recently shut and locked the door. The message—a question—was clearly visible and succinct. A re you prepared for your first wound?

Chapter 15 Are you prepared for your first wound? As though an Einsteinian switch had thrown time into slomo, the note slipped out of his fingers and seemed to float, float like a feather into his lap. The light went out. In a trance of terror, reaching with his right hand for the revolver on the passenger’s seat, Billy turned slowly to the right as well, intending to look over his shoulder and into the dark backseat. There would seem to be too little room back there for a man to have hidden; however, Billy had gotten into the Explorer hastily, heedlessly. He groped for the elusive gun, his fingertips brushed the checked grip of the weapon—and the window in the driver’s door imploded. As safety glass collapsed in a prickly mass across his chest and thighs, the revolver slipped out of his grasping fingers and tumbled onto the floor. Even as the glass was falling, before Billy could turn to face the assault, the freak reached into the SUV and seized a handful of his hair, at the crown of his head, twisted it and palled hard. Trapped by the steering wheel and the console, pulled ruthlessly by the hair, unable to scramble into the passenger’s seat and search for the gun, he clawed at the hand that held him, but ineffectively because a leather glove protected it. The freak was strong, vicious, relentless.

Billy’s hair should already have come out by the roots. The pain was excruciating. His vision blurred. The killer wanted to pull him headfirst and backward through the broken-out window. The back of Billy’s skull rapped hard against the window sill. Another solid rap snapped his teeth together and knocked a hoarse cry from him. He clutched at the steering wheel with his left hand, at the headrest on the driver’s seat with his right, resisting. The hair would come out in a great handful. The hair would come out, and he would be free. But the hair didn’t, and he wasn’t, and he thought of the horn. If he blew the horn, pounded the horn, help would come, and the freak would run. At once he realized that only the priest in the rectory would hear, and if the priest came, the killer wouldn’t flee. No, he would shoot the priest in the face just as he had shot Lanny. Maybe ten seconds had elapsed since the window had shattered, and the back of Billy’s head was being drawn inexorably across the window sill. The pain had quickly grown so intense that the roots of his hair seemed to extend through the flesh of his face—for his face hurt as well, stung as if flame had seared it—and seemed to extend also into his shoulders and arms, for as the tenacious roots came free, so did the strength in those muscles. The nape of his neck chilled on contact with the window sill. Crumbles of gummy safety glass jagged his skin. His head was being bent backward now. How quickly his exposed throat could be slit, how easily his spine might be snapped. He let go of the steering wheel. He reached behind his back, fumbling for the door handle. If he could open the door and thrust with sufficient force, he might unbalance his assailant, knock him down, and either break his grip or lose the hair at last. To reach the handle—slippery in his sweaty fingers—he had to twist his arm behind himself so torturously and bend his hand at such a severe angle that he didn’t have the range of movement to work the lever action.

As if sensing Billy’s intent, the freak leaned all his weight against the door. Billy’s head was largely out of the car now, and a face suddenly appeared above him, upside-down to his face. A countenance without features. A hooded phantom. He blinked to clear his vision. Not a hood. A dark ski mask. Even in this poor light, Billy could see the fevered gaze that glistered from the eyeholes. Something sprayed the lower half of his face, from the nose down. Wet, cold, pungent yet sweet, a medicinal reek. He gasped in shock, then tried to hold his breath, but the single gasp had undone him. Astringent fumes burned in his nostrils. His mouth flooded with saliva. The masked face seemed to lower toward his, like a dark moon coming down, the cratered eyes.

Chapter 16 The sedative wore off. Like a winch line turning on a drum, pain gradually hoisted Billy from unconsciousness. His mouth tasted as if he’d drunk waffle syrup and chased it with bleach. Sweet and bitter. Life itself. For a while he didn’t know where he was. Initially he did not care. Raised from a sea of torpor, he felt saturated with unnatural sleep and yearned to return to it. Eventually the unrelenting pain forced him to care, to keep his eyes

open, to analyze sensation and to orient himself. He was lying on his back on a hard surface—the church parking lot. He could smell the faint scents of tar, oil, gasoline. The vague nutty, musty fragrance of the oak tree spreading overhead in the darkness. His own sour perspiration. Licking his lips, he tasted blood. When he wiped his face, Billy found it slick with a viscous substance that was most likely a mixture of sweat and blood. In the dark, he could not see what had been transferred to his hand. The pain was mostly in his scalp. He first assumed that it was a lingering effect of having had his hair nearly pulled out. A slow pulsing ache, punctuated by a series of sharper pangs, radiated across his head, not from the crown, however, where his hair had been severely tested, but from his brow. When he raised one hand and hesitantly explored the source, he found something stiff and wiry bristling from his forehead, an inch below the hairline. Although his touch was gentle, it triggered a spasm of sharper pain that made him cry out. Are you prepared for your first wound? He left the exploration of the injury for later, until he could see the damage. The wound would not be mortal. The freak had not intended to kill him, only to hurt him, perhaps to scar him. Billy’s grudging respect for his adversary had grown to the point that he did not expect the man to make mistakes, at least not major ones. Billy sat up. Pain swelled across his brow, and again when he got to his feet. He stood swaying, surveying the parking lot. His assailant was gone. High in the night, a cluster of moving stars, the running lights of a jet, growled westward. On this route, it was probably a military transport headed for a war zone. Another war zone different from the one down here. He opened the driver’s door of the Explorer.

Crumbled safety glass littered the seat. He plucked a Kleenex box from the console and used it to scrape the prickly debris off the upholstery. He searched for the note that had been taped over the ignition. Evidently the killer had taken it. He found the dropped key under the brake pedal. From the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, he retrieved the revolver. He had been allowed to keep the gun for the game ahead. The freak didn’t fear it. The substance with which Billy had been sprayed—chloroform or some other anesthetic—had a lingering effect. When he bent over, he grew dizzy. Behind the wheel, with the door closed, with the engine running, he worried that he might not be fit to drive. He turned on the air conditioner, angled two vents at his face. As he assessed his transient dizziness, the interior lights went off automatically. Billy turned them on once more. He tilted the rearview mirror to inspect his face. He looked like a painted devil: dark red, but the teeth bright; dark red, and the whites of the eyes unnaturally white. When he adjusted the mirror again, he saw at once the source of his pain. Seeing did not immediately mean believing. He preferred to think that the residual dizziness from the anesthetic might be accompanied by hallucination. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He strove to clear the image in the mirror from his mind, and hoped that when he looked again he would not see the same. Nothing had changed. Across his forehead, an inch below the hairline, three large fishhooks pierced his flesh. The point and the barb of each hook protruded from the skin. The shank also protruded. The bend of each hook lay under the thin meat of his brow. He shuddered and looked away from the mirror.

There are days of doubt, more often lonely nights, when even the devout wonder if they are heirs to a greater kingdom than this earth and if they will know mercy—or if instead they are only animals like any other, with no inheritance except the wind and the dark. This was such a night for Billy. He had known others like it. Always the doubt had receded. He told himself that it would recede again, though this time it was colder and seemed certain to leave a higher water mark. The freak had at first seemed to be a player to whom murder was a sport. The fishhooks in the forehead, however, had not been intended as merely a game move; and this was no game. To the freak, these killings were something more than murder, but the something more was not a form of chess or the equivalent of poker. Homicide had symbolic meaning for him, and he pursued it with a purpose more serious than amusement. He had some mysterious goal beyond the killing itself, an aim for which he sought completion. Game was the wrong word, Billy needed to find the right one. Until he knew the correct word, he would never understand the killer, and would not find him. With Kleenex, he gently swabbed the clotted blood from his eyebrows, wiped most of it off his lids and lashes. The sight of the fishhooks had clarified his mind. He wasn’t dizzy anymore. His wounds needed attention. He switched on the headlights and drove out of the church parking lot. Whatever ultimate goal the freak might have, whatever symbolism he intended with the fishhooks, he must also have hoped to send Billy to a doctor. The physician would require an explanation of the hooks, and any response Billy made would complicate his predicament. If he told the truth, he would tie himself to the murders of Giselle Winslow and Lanny Olsen. He would be the primary suspect. Without the three notes, he could offer no evidence that the freak existed. The authorities would not regard the hooks as credible evidence, for they would wonder if this was a case of self-mutilation. A self-inflicted wound was a ploy that murderers sometimes used to cast themselves as

victims and thereby to deflect suspicion. He knew the cynicism with which some cops would look upon his dramatic, bizarre, but superficial wounds. He knew it precisely. Furthermore, Billy was a fresh-water angler. He fished for trout and bass. These substantial hooks were the size needed to land large bass if you were using live bait instead of lures. In his tackle box at home were hooks identical to those that now drew his blood. He dared not go to a doctor. He’d have to be his own physician. At 3:30 in the morning, he had the rural roadways to himself. The night was still, but the SUV made its own wind, which blustered at the broken-out window. In the halogen headlights, flat vineyards, hillside vineyards, and wooded heights remained familiar to his eye but, mile by mile, became as alien to his heart as any foreign barrens.

PART 2 ARE YOU PREPARED FOR YOUR SECOND WOUND?

Chapter 17 In February, after the extraction of a molar with roots fused to his jawbone, Billy had been given a prescription for a painkiller, Vicodin, by his periodontist. He had used only two of ten tablets.

The pharmacy label specified that the medication should be taken with food. He had not eaten dinner, and he still had no appetite. He needed the medication to be effective. From the refrigerator, he got a baking dish of leftover homemade lasagna. Although the punctures in his brow were plugged with clots and the bleeding had stopped, the pain continued unrelenting and made coherent thought increasingly difficult. He chose not to delay the few minutes necessary to zap the dish in the microwave. He put it cold on the kitchen table. A pink sticker on the pill bottle counseled against consuming alcoholic beverages while taking the painkiller. Screw that. He had no intention of driving a car or operating heavy machinery in the next several hours. He popped the tablet and forked lasagna into his mouth, washing everything down with Elephant beer, a Danish brew boasting a higher alcohol content than other beers. As he ate, he thought about the dead schoolteacher, about Lanny sitting in the bedroom armchair, about what the killer might do next. Those lines of thought were not conducive to appetite or to digestion. The teacher and Lanny were beyond rescue, and there was no way to foretell the freak’s next move. Instead, he thought about Barbara Mandel, mostly about Barbara as she had been, not as she was now in Whispering Pines. Inevitably, these reminiscences led forward to the moment, and he began to worry about what would happen to her if he died. He remembered the small square envelope from her physician. He fished it out of his pocket and tore it open. The name Dr. Jordan Ferrier was blind embossed on the face of the cream-colored note card. He had precise handwriting: Dear Billy, When you start timing your visits to Barbara in order to avoid me during my regular rounds, I know the time has come for our semiannual review of her condition. Please call my office to schedule an appointment. Sweat beaded the bottle of Elephant beer. He used Dr. Ferrier’s note card as a coaster to protect the table.

“Why don’t you call my office for an appointment,” Billy said. The baking dish was half full of lasagna. Although he had no appetite, he ate everything, shoving food into his mouth and chewing vigorously, ate as if eating could satiate anger as easily as it could hunger. Eventually the pain in his forehead substantially subsided. He went to his fishing gear in the garage. From his angler’s kit, he retrieved needle-nose pliers with a wire-cutting edge. In the house again, after locking the back door, he went to the bathroom, where he examined his face in the mirror. The mask of blood had dried. He looked like an aboriginal resident of Hell. The freak had inserted the three hooks with care. Apparently, he had tried to do as little damage as possible. To suspicious police, that tenderness would have supported the theory that these wounds were self-inflicted. One end of the hook featured the bend and the barb. At the other end was an eye to which a snap and leader could be attached. Pulling either the barb or the eye through the puncture would further rip the flesh. He used the pliers to snip off the eye from one hook. Between thumb and forefinger, he pinched the barbed end and extracted the cut shank. When he had removed all three hooks, he took a shower as hot as he could tolerate. After the shower, he sterilized the punctures as best he could with rubbing alcohol and then hydrogen peroxide. He applied Neosporin and covered the wounds with gauze pads fixed with adhesive tape. At 4:27 A.M., according to the nightstand clock, Billy went to bed. A double bed, two sets of pillows. His head on one soft pillow, the hard revolver under the other. May the judgment not be too heavy upon us… As his eyelids fell shut of their own weight, he saw Barbara in his mind’s eye, her pale lips forming inscrutable statements. I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying. He was asleep before the clock counted the half hour.

In his dream, he lay in a coma, unable to move or to speak, but nonetheless aware of the world around him. Doctors in white lab coats and black ski masks loomed, working on his flesh with steel scalpels, carving clusters of bloody acanthus leaves. Resurgent pain, dull but persistent, woke him at 8:40 Wednesday morning. At first, he could not remember which of his recent nightmarish experiences had been dreamed, which real. Then he could. He wanted another Vicodin. Instead, in the bathroom, he shook two aspirin from a bottle. Intending to take the aspirins with orange juice, he went into the kitchen. He had neglected to put the baking pan, crusted with the residue of lasagna, in the dishwasher. The empty bottle of Elephant beer stood on Dr. Ferrier’s stationery. Morning light flooded the room. The blinds had been raised. The windows had been covered when he’d gone to bed. Taped to the refrigerator was a folded sheet of paper, the fourth message from the killer.

Chapter 18 He knew beyond doubt that he had engaged the deadbolt in the back door when he had returned from the garage with the needle-nose pliers. Now it was unlocked. Stepping onto the porch, he surveyed the western woods. A few elms in the foreground, pines beyond. The morning sun bent all tree shadows in upon the grove and probed those dusky reaches without much illuminating them. As his gaze traveled the Greenwood, seeking the telltale flare of sunlight off the lenses of binoculars, he saw movement. Mysterious forms whidded among the trees, as fluid as the shadows of birds in flight, flickering palely when sunlight dappled them. A sense of the

uncanny overcame Billy. Then the forms broke from the trees, and they were only deer: a buck, two does, a fawn. He thought that something must have spooked them in the woods, but they gamboled only a few yards onto the lawn before coming to a halt. As serene as deer in Eden, they grazed upon the tender grass. Returning to the house, leaving the deer to their breakfast, Billy locked the back door even though he gained no safety from the deadbolt. If the killer didn’t possess a key, then he owned lock picks and was experienced in their use. Leaving the note undisturbed, Billy opened the fridge. He took out a quart of orange juice. As he drank juice from the carton, washing down the aspirins, he stared at the note taped to the refrigerator. He did not touch it. He put two English muffins in the toaster. When they were crisp, he spread peanut butter on them and ate at the kitchen table. If he never read the note, if he burned it in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain, he would be removing himself from the game. The first problem with that idea was the same that had pricked his conscience before: Inaction counted as a choice. The second problem was that he himself had become a victim of assault. And he had been promised more. Are you prepared for your first wound? The freak had not underlined or italicized first, but Billy understood where the emphasis belonged. Although he had his faults, self-delusion wasn’t one of them. If he didn’t read the note, if he tried to opt out, he would be even less able to imagine what might be coming than he was now. When the ax fell on him, he would not even hear the blade cutting the air above his head. Besides, this was in no way a game to the killer, which Billy had realized the previous night. Denied a playmate, the freak would not simply pick up his ball and go home. He would see this through to whatever end he had in mind. Billy would have liked to carve acanthus leaves. He wanted to work a crossword puzzle. He was good at them.

Laundry, yard work, cleaning out the rain gutters, painting the mailbox: He could lose himself in the mundane chores of daily life, and take solace in them. He wanted to work at the tavern and let the hours pass in a blur of repetitive tasks and inane conversations. All the mystery he needed—and all the drama—was to be found in his visits to Whispering Pines, in the puzzling words that Barbara sometimes spoke and in his persistent belief that there was hope for her. He needed nothing more. He had nothing more. He had nothing more until this, which he didn’t need and didn’t want—but could not escape. Finished with the muffins, he took the plate and knife to the sink. He washed them, dried them, and put them away. In the bathroom, he peeled the bandage off his forehead. Each hook had torn him twice. The six punctures looked red and raw. Gently he washed the wounds, then reapplied alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and Neosporin. He fashioned a fresh bandage. His brow was cool to the touch. If the hook had been dirty, an infection might not be prevented by his precautions, especially if the points and barbs had scored the bone. He was safe from tetanus. Four years previously, renovating the garage to accommodate a woodworking shop, he’d sustained a deep cut in his left hand, from a hinge that corrosion had made brittle and sharp. He’d gotten a booster shot of DPT vaccine. Tetanus didn’t worry him. He would not die of tetanus. Neither would he die of infected hook wounds. This was a false worry to give his mind a rest from real and greater threats. In the kitchen, he peeled the note off the refrigerator. He wadded it in his fist and took it to the waste can. Instead of throwing the note away, he smoothed it on the table and read it. Stay home this morning. An associate of mine will come to see you at 11:00. Wait for him on the front porch. If you don’t stay home, I will kill a child. If you inform the police, I will kill a child. You seem so angry. Have I

not extended to you the hand of friendship? Yes, I have. Associate. The word troubled Billy. He did not like that word at all. In rare cases, homicidal sociopaths worked in pairs. The cops called them kill buddies. The Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles had proved to be a pair of cousins. The D.C. Sniper had been two men. The Manson Family numbered more than two. A simple bartender might rationally hope to get the best of one ruthless psychopath. Not two. Billy did not consider going to the police. The freak had twice proved his sincerity; if disobeyed, he would kill a child. In this instance, at least, a choice was open to him that did not entail selecting anyone for death. Although the first four lines of the note were straightforward, the meaning of the last two lines could not be easily interpreted. Have I not extended to you the hand of friendship? The mockery was evident. Billy also detected a taunting quality suggesting that information had been offered here that would prove helpful to him if only he could understand it. Rereading the message six times—eight, even ten—did not bring clarity. Only frustration. With this note, Billy had evidence again. Although it did not amount to much and would not itself impress the police, he intended to keep it safe. In the living room, he surveyed the book collection. In recent years, it had been nothing to him except something to be dusted. He selected In Our Time. He tucked the killer’s note between the copyright page and the dedication page, and he returned the volume to the shelf. He thought of Lanny Olsen sitting dead in an armchair with an adventure novel in his lap. In the bedroom, he fetched the .38 Smith and Wesson from under the pillow.

As he handled the revolver, he remembered how it felt when it discharged. The barrel wanted to rake up. The backstrap hardened against the meat of the palm, and the recoil traveled the bones of the hand and arm, seeming to churn the marrow as a school of fish churned water. In a dresser drawer was an open box of ammunition. He put three spare cartridges in each of the front pockets of his chinos. That seemed to be enough insurance. Whatever might be coming, it would not be a war. It would be violent and vicious, but brief. He smoothed the night out of the bedclothes. Although he didn’t use a spread, he plumped the pillows and tucked in the sheets so they were as taut as a drum skin. When he picked up the gun from the nightstand, he remembered not only the recoil but also what it felt like to kill a man.

Chapter 19 Jackie O’Hara answered his cell phone with a line he sometimes used when he worked behind the bar. “What can I do ya for?” “Boss, it’s Billy.” “Hey, Billy, you know what they were talking about in the tavern last night?” “Sports?” “The hell they were. We’re not a damn sports bar.” Looking out a kitchen window toward the lawn from which the deer had vanished, Billy said, “Sorry.” “The guys in sports bars—the drinking doesn’t mean anything to them.” “It’s just a way to get high.”

“That’s right. They’d as soon smoke a little pot or even get a Starbucks buzz. We’re not a damn sports bar.” Having heard this before, Billy tried to move the discussion along: “To our customers, the drinking is a kind of ceremony.” “Beyond ceremony. It’s an observance, a solemnity, almost a kind of sacrament. Not to all of them, but to most. It’s communion.” “All right. So were they talking about Big Foot?” “I wish. The best, the really intense barroom talk used to be about Big Foot, flying saucers, the lost continent of Atlantis, what happened to the dinosaurs—” “—what’s on the dark side of the moon,” Billy interjected, “the Loch Ness monster, the Shroud of Turin—” “—ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, all that classic stuff,” Jackie continued. “But it’s not like that so much anymore.” “I know,” Billy acknowledged. “They were talking about these professors at Harvard and Yale and Princeton, these scientists who say they’re going to use cloning and stem cells and genetic engineering to create a superior race.” “Smarter and faster and better than we are,” Billy said. “So much better than we are,” Jackie said, “they won’t be human at all. It’s in Time or maybe Newsweek, these scientists smiling and proud of themselves right in a magazine.” “They call it the posthuman future,” Billy said. “What happens to us when we’re post?” Jackie wondered. “Post is toast. A master race? Haven’t these guys heard of Hitler?” “They think they’re different,” Billy said. “Don’t they have mirrors? Some idiots are crossing human and animal genes to create new… new things. One of them wants to create a pig that’s got a human brain.” “How about that.”

“The magazine doesn’t say why a pig, like it should be obvious why a pig instead of a cat or a cow or a chipmunk. For God’s sake, Billy, isn’t it hard enough being a human brain in a human body? What kind of hell would it be a human brain in a pig body?” “Maybe we won’t live to see it,” Billy said. “Unless you’re planning to die tomorrow, you will. I liked Big Foot better. I liked the Bermuda Triangle and ghosts a lot better. Now all the crazy shit is real.” “Why I called,” Billy said, “is to let you know I can’t make it to work today.” With genuine concern, Jackie said, “Hey, what, are you sick?” “I’m kind of queasy.” “You don’t sound like you have a cold.” “I don’t think it’s a cold. It’s like a stomach thing.” “Sometimes a summer cold starts that way. Better take zinc. They’ve got this zinc gel you squeeze up your nose. It really works. It stops a cold dead.” “I’ll get some.” “Too late for vitamin C. You gotta be taking that all along.” “I’ll get some zinc. Did I call too early, did you close up the tavern last night?” “No. I went home at ten o’clock. All that talk about pigs with human brains, I just wanted to go home.” “So Steve Zillis closed up?” “Yeah. He’s a reliable boy. That stuff I told you, I wish now I hadn’t. If he wants to chop up mannequins and watermelons in his backyard, that’s his business, as long as he does his job.”

Tuesday night was often slow in the bar business. If the traffic grew light, Jackie preferred to lock the tavern before the usual 2:00 A.M. closing time. An open bar with few or no customers in the wee hours is a temptation to a stickup artist, putting employees at risk.

“Busy night?” Billy asked. “Steve said after eleven it was like the world ended. He had to open the front door and look outside to be sure the tavern hadn’t been teleported to the moon or somewhere. He turned off the lights before midnight. Thank God there aren’t two Tuesdays in a week.” Billy said, “People like to spend some time with their families. That’s the curse of a family bar.” “You’re a funny guy, aren’t you?” “Not usually.” “If you put that zinc gel up your nose and you don’t feel any better,” Jackie said, “call me back, and I’ll tell you somewhere else you can stuff it.” “I think you’d have made a fine priest. I really do.” “Get well, okay? The customers miss you when you’re off.” “Do they?” “Not really. But at least they don’t say they’re glad you’re gone.” Under the circumstances, perhaps only Jackie O’Hara could have made Billy Wiles crack a smile. He hung up. He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty-one. The “associate” would be here in less than half an hour. If Steve Zillis had left the tavern shortly before midnight, he would have had plenty of time to go to Lanny’s place, kill him, and move the body to the armchair in the master bedroom. If Billy had been handicapping suspects, he would have given long odds on Steve. But once in a while, a long shot won the race.

Chapter 20

On the front porch were two teak rocking chairs with dark-green cushions, Billy seldom needed the second chair. This morning, wearing a white T-shirt and chinos, he occupied the one farthest from the porch steps. He didn’t rock. He sat quite still. Beside him stood a teak cocktail table. On the table, on a cork coaster, was a glass of cola. He hadn’t drunk any of the cola. He had prepared it as a prop, to distract the eye from consideration of the box of Ritz crackers. The box contained nothing but the snub-nosed revolver. The only crackers were a stack of three on the table, beside the box. Bright and clear and hot, the day was too dry to please the grape growers, but it was all right with Billy. From the porch, between deodar cedars, he could see a long way down the rural road that sloped up toward his house and far beyond. Not much traffic passed. He recognized some of the vehicles, but he didn’t know to whom they belonged. Rising off the sun-scorched blacktop, shimmering heat ghosts haunted the morning. At 10:53, a figure appeared in the distance, on foot. Billy did not expect the associate to hike in for the meeting. He assumed this was not the man. At first the figure might have been a mirage. The furnace heat distorted him, made him ripple as if he were a reflection on water. Once he seemed to evaporate, then reappeared. In the hard light, he looked tall and thin, unnaturally thin, as if he had recently hung on a cross in a cornfield, glaring the birds away with his button eyes. He turned off the county road and followed the driveway. He left the driveway for the grass and, at 10:58, arrived at the bottom of the porch steps. “Mr. Wiles?” he asked. “Yes.”

“I believe you’re expecting me.” He had the raw, rough voice of one who had marinated his larynx in whiskey and slow-cooked it in years of cigarette smoke. “What’s your name?” Billy asked. “I’m Ralph Cottle, sir.” Billy had thought the question would be ignored. If the man were hiding behind a false name, John Smith would have been good enough. Ralph Cottle sounded real. Cottle was as thin as the distorting heat had made him appear to be from a distance, but not as tall. His scrawny neck looked as if it might snap with the weight of his head. He wore white tennis shoes dark with age and filth. Shiny in spots and frayed at the cuffs, the cocoa-brown, summer-weight suit hung on him with no more grace than it would have hung from a coat rack. His polyester shirt was limp, stained, and missing a button. These were thrift-shop clothes from the cheapest bin; and he had gotten long wear out of them. “Mr. Wiles, may I come in the shade?” Standing at the bottom of the steps, Cottle looked as if the weight of the sunlight might collapse him. He seemed too frail to be a threat, but you never could tell. “There’s a chair for you,” Billy said. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate the kindness.” Billy tensed as Cottle ascended the stairs but relaxed a little when the man had settled into the other rocker. Cottle didn’t rock, either, as if getting the chair moving was a more strenuous task than he cared to contemplate. “Sir, do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. “Yes. I do mind.” “I understand. It’s a filthy habit.”

From an inner coat pocket, Cottle produced a pint of Seagram’s and unscrewed the cap. His bony hands trembled. He didn’t ask if it was all right to drink. He just took a swig. Apparently, he had sufficient control of his nicotine jones to be polite about it. The hooch, on the other hand, told him when he needed it, and he could not disobey its liquid voice. Billy suspected that other pints were tucked in other pockets, plus cigarettes and matches, and possibly a couple of hand-rolled joints. This explained why a suit in summer heat: It was not only clothing but also a portmanteau for his various vices. The booze didn’t heighten the color of his face. His skin was already dark from much sun and red from an intricate web of burst capillaries. “How far did you walk?” Billy asked. “Only from the junction. I hitched a ride that far.” Billy must have looked skeptical, for Cottle added, “A lot of people know me around these parts. They know I’m harmless, unkempt but not dirty.” Indeed, his blond hair looked clean, though uncombed. He had shaved, too, his leathery face tough enough to resist nicking even with the razor wielded by such an unsteady hand. His age was difficult to determine. He might have been forty or sixty, but not thirty or seventy. “He’s a very bad man, Mr. Wiles.” “Who?” “The one who sent me.” “You’re his associate.” “No more than I’m a monkey.” “Associate—that’s what he called you.” “Do I look like a monkey, either?” “What’s his name?” “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“What’s he look like?” “I haven’t seen his face. I hope I never do.” “A ski mask?” Billy guessed. “Yes, sir. And eyes looking out of it cold as snake eyes.” His voice quavered in sympathy with his hands, and he tipped the bottle to his mouth again. “What color were his eyes?” Billy asked. “They looked yellow as egg yolks to me, but that was just the lamplight in them.” Remembering the encounter in the church parking lot, Billy said, “There was too little light for me to see color… just a hot shine.” “I’m not such a bad man, Mr. Wiles. Not like him. What I am is weak.” “Why’ve you come here?” “Money, for one thing. He paid me one hundred forty dollars, all in ten-dollar bills.” “One-forty? What—did you bargain him up from a hundred?” “No, sir. That’s the precise sum he offered. He said it’s ten dollars for each year of your innocence, Mr. Wiles.” In silence, Billy stared at him. Ralph Cottle’s eyes might once have been a vibrant blue. Maybe all the alcohol had faded them, for they were the palest blue eyes that Billy had ever seen, the faint blue of the sky at high altitude where there is too little atmosphere to provide rich color and where the void beyond is barely concealed. After a moment, Cottle broke eye contact, looked out at the yard, the trees, the road. “Do you know what that means?” Billy asked. “My fourteen years of innocence?” “No, sir. And it’s none of my business. He just wanted me to make a point of telling you that.”

“You said money was one thing. What was the other?” “He’d kill me if I didn’t come see you.” “That’s what he threatened to do?” “He doesn’t make threats, Mr. Wiles.” “Sounds like one.” “He just says what is, and you know it’s true. I come see you or I’m dead. And not dead easy, either, but very hard.” “Do you know what he’s done?” Billy asked. “No, sir. And don’t you tell me.” “There’s two of us now who know he’s real. We can corroborate each other’s story.” “Don’t even talk that way.” “Don’t you see, he’s made a mistake.” “I wish I could be his mistake,” Cottle said, “but I’m not. You think too much of me, and shouldn’t.” “But he’s got to be stopped,” Billy said. “Not by me. I’m nobody’s hero. Don’t you tell me what he’s done. Don’t you dare.” “Why shouldn’t I tell you?” “That’s your world. It isn’t mine.” “There’s just one world.” “No, sir. There’s a billion of them. Mine’s different from yours, and that’s the way it’s gonna stay.” “We’re sitting here on the same porch.” “No, sir. It looks like one porch, but it’s two, all right. You know that’s true. I see it in you.” “See what?”

“I see the way you’re a little like me.” Chilled, Billy said, “You can’t see anything. You won’t even look at me.” Ralph Cottle met Billy’s eyes again. “Have you seen the woman’s face in the jar like a jellyfish?” The conversation had suddenly switched from the main track to a strange spur line. “What woman?” Billy asked. Cottle knocked back another slug from the pint. “He says he’s had her in the jar three years.” “Jar? Better stop pouring down that nose paint, Ralph. You’re not making much sense.” Cottle closed his eyes and grimaced, as if he could see what he now described. “It’s a two-quart jar, maybe bigger, with a wide-mouth lid. He changes the formaldehyde regularly to keep it from clouding.” Beyond the porch, the sky was crystalline. High in the clear light, a lone hawk circled, as clean as a shadow. “The face tends to fold into itself,” Cottle continued, “so you don’t at first see a face. It’s like something from the sea, clenched yet billowy. So he gently shakes the jar, gently swirls the contents, and the face… it blossoms.” The grass is sweet and green across the lawn, then taller and golden where nature alone tends to it. The two grasses produce distinct fragrances, each crisp and pleasant in its own way. “You recognize an ear first,” said Ralph Cottle. “The ears are attached, and the cartilage gives them shape. There’s cartilage in the nose, too, but it hasn’t held its shape very well. The nose is just a lump.” From the shining heights, the hawk descended in a narrowing gyre, describing silent and harmonious curves. “The lips are full, but the mouth is just a hole, and the eyes are holes. There’s no hair, ‘cause he cut only from one ear to the other, from the top of the brow to the bottom of the chin. You can’t tell it’s a woman’s face, and not a man’s. He says she was beautiful, but there’s no beauty in the jar.”

Billy said, “It’s just a mask, latex, a trick.” “Oh, it’s real. It’s as real as terminal cancer. He says it was the second act in one of his best performances.” “Performances?” “He has four photos of her face. In the first, she’s alive. Then dead. In the third, the face is partly peeled back. In the fourth, her head is there, her hair, but the soft tissue of her face is gone, nothing but bone, the grinning skull.” From graceful gyre to sudden plunge, the hawk knifed toward the tall grass. The pint told Ralph Cottle that he needed fortification, and he drank a new foundation for his crumbling courage. Following a fumy exhalation, he said, “The first photo, when she was alive, maybe she was pretty like he says. You can’t tell because… she’s all terror. She’s ugly with terror.” The tall grass, previously motionless in the fixative heat, stirred briefly in a single place, where feathers thrashed the stalks. “The face in that first picture,” Cottle said, “is worse than the one in the jar. It’s a lot worse.” The hawk burst from the grass and soared. Its talons clutched something small, perhaps a field mouse, which struggled in terror, or didn’t. At this distance, you couldn’t be sure. Cottle’s voice was a file rasping on ancient wood. “If I don’t do exactly what he wants me to, he promises to put my face in a jar. And while he harvests it, he’ll keep me alive, and conscious.” In the bright pellucid sky, the rising hawk was as black and clean as a shadow once more. Its wings cleaved the shining air, and the high thermals were the pristine currents of a river through which it swam, and dwindled, and vanished, having killed only what it needed to survive.

Chapter 21 Rockless in the rocking chair, Ralph Cottle said that he lived in a ramshackle cottage by the river. Two rooms and a porch with a view, the place had been hammered together in the 1930’s and had been falling apart ever since. Long ago, unknown rugged individuals had used the cottage for fishing vacations. It had no electric service. An outhouse served as the toilet. The only running water was what passed in the river. “I think mainly it was a place for them to get away from their wives,” Cottle said. “A place to drink and get drunk. It still is.” A fireplace provided heat and allowed simple cooking. What meals Cottle ate were spooned from hot cans. Once the property had been privately owned. Now it belonged to the county, perhaps seized for back taxes. Like much government land, it was poorly managed. No bureaucrats or game wardens had bothered Ralph Cottle since the day, eleven years ago, when he had cleaned out the cottage, put down his bedroll, and settled in as a squatter. No neighbors lived within sight or within shouting distance. The cottage was a secluded outpost, which suited Cottle just fine. Until 3:45 the previous morning, when he had been prodded awake by a visitor in a ski mask: Then what had seemed like cozy privacy had become a terrifying isolation. Cottle had fallen asleep without extinguishing the oil lamp by which he read Western novels and drank himself to sleep. In spite of that light, he hadn’t absorbed any useful details about the killer’s appearance. He couldn’t estimate the man’s height or weight. He claimed the madman’s voice had no memorable characteristics. Billy figured Cottle knew more but feared to tell. The anxiety that now simmered in his faded blue eyes was as pure and intense, if not as immediate, as the terror he described in the photograph of the unknown

woman from whom the freak had “harvested” a face. Judging by the length of his skeletal fingers and the formidable bones in his knobby wrists, Cottle had once been equipped to fight back. Now, by his own admission, he was weak, not just emotionally and morally, but physically. Nevertheless, Billy leaned forward in his chair and tried again to enlist him: “Back me up with the police. Help me—” “I can’t even help myself, Mr. Wiles.” “You must’ve once known how.” “I don’t want to remember.” “Remember what?” “Anything. I told you—I’m weak.” “Sounds like you want to be.” Raising the pint to his lips, Cottle smiled thinly and, before taking a drink, said, “Haven’t you heard—the meek shall inherit the earth.” “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.” Licking his lips, which were badly chapped by the heat and by the dehydrating effect of the whiskey, Cottle said, “Why would I?” “The meek don’t stand by and watch another man destroyed. The meek aren’t the same as cowards. They’re two different breeds.” “You can’t insult me into cooperation. I don’t insult. I don’t care. I know I’m nothing, and that’s all right with me.” “Just because you’ve come here to do what he wants, you won’t be safe out there in your cottage.” Screwing the cap on the bottle, Cottle said, “Safer than you.” “Not at all. You’re a loose end. Listen, the police will give you protection.” A dry laugh escaped the stewbum. “Is that why you’ve been so quick to run to them—for their protection?”

Billy said nothing. Emboldened by Billy’s silence, Cottle found a sharper voice that was less mean than smug: “Just like me, you’re nothing, but you don’t know it yet. You’re nothing, I’m nothing, we’re all nothing, and as far as I care, if he leaves me alone, that psycho shithead can do what he wants to anybody because he’s nothing, too.” Watching Cottle screw open the pint-bottle cap that he had just screwed shut, Billy said, “What if I throw your ass down those stairs and kick you off my land? He calls me sometimes just to wear on my nerves. What if when he calls I tell him you were drunk, incoherent, I couldn’t understand a thing you said?” Cottle’s sunburned and blood-fused face could not turn pale, but his small purse of a mouth, snugged tight with self-satisfaction after his rant, now loosened and poured forth the dull coins of a counterfeit apology. “Mr. Wiles, sir, please don’t take offense at my bad mouth. I can’t control what comes out of it any more than I can control what I pour into it.” “He wanted to be sure you told me about the face in the jar, didn’t he?” “Yes, sir.” “Why?” “I don’t know. He didn’t consult with me, sir. He just put words in my mouth to bring to you, and here I am because I want to live.” “Why?” “Sir?” “Look at me, Ralph.” Cottle met his eyes. Billy said, “Why do you want to live?” As though Cottle had never considered it before, the question seemed to pin down some fluttering thing in his mind, like a rare moth to a specimen board, some ever-restless and ever-contentious and ever-bitter aspect of himself that for a moment he seemed at last disposed to consider. Then his eyes became evasive, and he clasped both hands, not just one, around the pint of whiskey.

“Why do you want to live?” Billy persisted. “What else is there?” Avoiding Billy’s eyes, Cottle raised the bottle in both hands, as if it were a chalice. “I could use just a taste,” he said, as though asking for permission. “Go ahead.” He took a small sip, but then at once took another. “The freak made you tell me about the face in the jar because he wants that image in my head.” “If you say so.” “It’s about intimidation, about keeping me off balance.” “Are you?” Instead of answering the question, Billy said, “What else did he send you here to tell me?” As if getting down to business, Cottle screwed the cap on the bottle again and this time returned the pint to his coat pocket. “You’ll have five minutes to make a decision.” “What decision?” “Take off your wristwatch and prop it on the porch railing.” “Why?” “To count off the five minutes.” “I can count them with the watch on my wrist.” “Putting it on the railing is a signal to him that the countdown has started.” Woods to the north, shadowy and cool in the hot day. Green lawn, then tall golden grass, then a few well-crowned oaks, then a couple of houses down-slope and to the east. To the west lay the county road, trees and fields beyond it. “He’s watching now?” Billy asked. “He promised he would be, Mr. Wiles.”

“From where?” “I don’t know, sir. Just please, please take off your watch and prop it on the railing.” “And if I won’t?” “Mr. Wiles, don’t talk that way.” “But if I won’t?” Billy pressed. His baritone rasp thinned to a higher register as Cottle said, “I told you, he’ll take my face, and me awake when he does. I told you.” Billy got up, removed his Timex, and propped it on the railing so that the watch face could be seen from both of the rocking chairs. As the sun approached the zenith of its arc, it penetrated the landscape and melted shadows everywhere but in the woods. The green-cloaked conspiratorial trees revealed no secrets. “Mr. Wiles, you’ve got to sit down.” Brightness fell from the air, and a chrome-yellow glare hazed the fields and furrows, forcing Billy to squint at numberless places where a man could lie in the open, effectively camouflaged by nothing more than spangled sunlight. “You won’t spot him,” Cottle said, “and he won’t like it that you’re trying. Come back, sit down.” Billy remained on his feet at the railing. “You’ve wasted half a minute, Mr. Wiles, forty seconds.” Billy didn’t move. “You don’t know what a box you’re in,” Cottle said anxiously. “You’re gonna need every minute he’s given you to think.” “So tell me about the box.” “You have to be sitting down. For God’s sake, Mr. Wiles.” Cottle wrung his voice as a worried old woman might wring her hands. “He wants you sitting in the chair.”

Billy returned to the rocking chair. “I just want to be done with this,” Cottle said. “I just want to do what he told me and get out of here.” “Now you’re the one wasting time.” One of the five minutes had passed. “All right, okay,” Cottle said. “This is him talking now. You understand? This is him.” “Get on with it.” Cottle nervously licked his lips. He slipped the pint from his coat, not seeking a taste at the moment, instead clutching it with both hands, as if it were a talisman with the occult power to lift the fog of whiskey that blurred his memory, ensuring that he would deliver the message clearly enough to save his face from being pickled in a jar. “ ‘I will kill someone you know. You will select the target for me from people in your life,’” Cottle quoted. “ ‘This is your chance to rid the world of some hopeless asshole.’” “The twisted sonofabitch,” Billy said, and discovered that both of his hands were fisted, with nothing to punch. “ ‘If you don’t select the target for me,’” Cottle continued quoting, “ ‘I will choose someone in your life to kill. You have five minutes to decide. The choice is yours, if you have the balls to make it.’”

Chapter 22 The effort to recall the precise wording of the message reduced Ralph Cottle to a hive of buzzing nerves. Countless anxieties swarmed through him and were glimpsed in his darting eyes, in his twitching face, in his trembling hands; Billy could almost hear the thrumming wings of dread.

While Cottle had recited the freak’s challenge and conditions, with the penalty of death hanging over him if he got them wrong, the pint bottle had been a talisman with the power to inspire, but now he needed the contents. Staring at the wristwatch on the porch railing, Billy said, “I don’t need five minutes. Hell, I don’t even need the three that’re left.” Without intention, by not going to the police and getting them involved, he had already contributed to the death of one person in his life: Lanny Olsen. By his inaction, he had spared the mother of two, but he had doomed his friend. Lanny himself had been partly if not largely responsible for his own death. He had taken the killer’s notes and had destroyed them to save his job and his pension, at the cost of his life. Nevertheless, some of the blame lay with Billy. He could feel the weight; and always would. What the freak demanded of him now was something new and more terrible than anything heretofore. Not by inaction this time, not by inadvertence, but by conscious intent, Billy was expected to mark someone he knew for death. “I won’t do it,” he said. Having guzzled a dram or two, Cottle was sliding the wet mouth of the bottle back and forth across his lips, as if he might French kiss it instead of drinking any more. Through his nose, he noisily inhaled the rising fumes. “If you won’t do it, he will,” said Cottle. “Why would I choose? I’m screwed either way, aren’t I?” “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. It’s not my business.” “The hell it’s not.” “It’s not my business,” Cottle insisted. “I’ve got to sit here till you give me your decision, then I give it to him, and I’m not a part of it anymore. You’ve got just more than two minutes left.” “I’m going to the cops.” “It’s too late for that.”

“I’m in shit to my hips,” Billy admitted, “but I’ll only be deeper later.” When Billy rose from his rocking chair, Cottle said sharply, “Sit down! If you try to leave this porch before I do, you’ll be shot in the head.” The stewbum stowed bottles in his pockets, not weapons. Even if Cottle had a gun, Billy was confident about taking it from him. “Not me,” Cottle said. “Him. How he’s watching us right now is through the scope of a high-powered rifle.” The gloom of the woods to the north, the dazzle of sun on the slope to the east, the rock formations and swales of the fields on the south side of the county road… “He can just about read our lips,” Cottle said. “It’s the finest marksman’s gun, and he’s qualified for it. He can nail you at a thousand yards.” “Maybe that’s what I want.” “He’s willing to oblige. But he doesn’t think you’re ready. He says you will be eventually. In the end, he says, you’ll ask him to kill you. But not yet.” Even with his weight of guilt, Billy Wiles suddenly felt like a feather, and he feared a sudden wind. He settled into the rocking chair. “Why it’s too late to go to the cops,” Cottle said, “is because he planted evidence in her place, on her body.” The day remained still, but here came the wind. “What evidence?” “For one thing, some of your hairs in her fist and under her fingernails.” Billy’s mouth felt numb. “How would he get my hairs?” “From your shower drain.” Before the nightmare had begun, when Giselle Winslow had still been alive, the freak had already been in this house. The shade on the porch no longer held the summer heat at bay. Billy might as well have been standing on blacktop in the sun. “What else besides hairs?”

“He didn’t say. But it’s nothing the police will tie to you… unless for some reason you come under suspicion.” “Which he can make happen.” “If the cops start thinking maybe they should ask you for a DNA sample, you’re finished.” Cottle glanced at the wristwatch. So did Billy. “One minute left,” Cottle advised.

Chapter 23 One minute. Billy Wiles stared at his wristwatch as if it were a bomb clock counting down to detonation. He wasn’t thinking about the fleeting seconds or the evidence planted at the scene of Giselle Winslow’s murder, or about being in the sights of a high-powered rifle. Instead, he was composing a mental directory of people in his life. Faces flickered rapidly through his mind. Those he liked. Those toward whom he was indifferent. Those he disliked. These were dark shoals. He could founder on them. Yet turning his mind away from such thoughts proved as difficult as ignoring a knife held to his throat. A knife of another kind, a knife of guilt cut him loose from these considerations at last. Realizing how seriously he had been calculating the comparative value of the people in his life, assessing which of them had a lesser right to life than others, he could not repress a shudder of disgust. “No,” he said, seconds before his time ran out. “No, I’ll never choose.

He can go to Hell.” “Then he’ll choose for you,” Cottle reminded Billy. “He can go to Hell.” “All right. It’s your call. It’s on your shoulders, Mr. Wiles. It’s none of my business.” “Now what?” “You stay in the chair, sir, right where you are. I’m supposed to go inside to the kitchen phone, wait for his call, and tell him your decision.” “I’ll go inside,” Billy said. “I’ll take the call.” “You’re making me crazy,” Cottle said, “you’re gonna get us both killed.” “It’s my house.” When he raised the bottle to his mouth, Cottle’s hands shook so badly that the glass rattled against his teeth. Whiskey dribbled down his chin. Without wiping the spill off his face, he said, “He wants you in that chair. You try to go inside, he’ll blow your brains out before you reach the door.” “What sense does that make?” “Then he’ll blow my brains out, too, because I couldn’t make you listen to me.” “He won’t,” Billy disagreed, beginning to intuit something of the freak’s perspective. “He’s not ready to end it, not this way.” “What do you know? You don’t know. You don’t know squat.” “He’s got a plan, a purpose, something that might not make sense to you or me, but it makes sense to him.” “I’m just a useless damn drunk, but even I know you’re full of crap.” “He wants to work it all out the way he conceived it,” Billy said more to himself than to Cottle, “not just end it in the middle with two head shots.”

Anxiously surveying the sun-dazzled day beyond the front porch, spraying spittle as he spoke, Ralph Cottle said, “You bullheaded sonofabitch, will you listen to me! You don’t listen!” “I’m listening.” “More than anything, he wants things done his way. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Get it? Maybe he doesn’t want you to hear his voice.” That made sense if the freak was someone whom Billy knew. Cottle said, “Or maybe he just doesn’t want to listen to your bullshit any more than I do. I don’t know. If you want to answer the phone to show him who’s boss, just to piss him off, and he blows your brains out, I don’t give a rat’s ass. But then he’ll kill me, too, and you can’t choose for me. You can’t choose for me!” Billy knew that his instincts were right: The freak wouldn’t shoot them. “Your five minutes are up,” Cottle said worriedly, gesturing toward the watch on the railing. “Six minutes. You’re past six minutes. He won’t like this.” In truth, Billy didn’t know the freak would hold his fire. He suspected that would be the case, intuited it, but he didn’t know. “Your time is up. Going on seven minutes. Seven minutes. He expects me to leave the porch, go inside.” Cottle’s faded blue eyes were boiled in fear. He had so little to live for, yet he was desperate to live. What else is there? he had said. “Go,” Billy told him. “What?” “Go inside. Go to the phone.” Bolting up from his rocking chair, Cottle dropped the open pint. Several ounces of whiskey spilled from the uncapped mouth. Cottle didn’t stoop to retrieve his treasure. In fact, in his haste to get to the front door, he kicked the bottle and sent it spinning across the porch floor. At the threshold to the house, he looked back and said, “I’m not sure

how quick he’ll call.” “You just remember every word he says,” Billy instructed. “You remember every word exactly.” “All right, sir. I will.” “And every inflection. You remember every word and how he says it, and you come tell me.” “I will, Mr. Wiles. Every word,” Cottle promised, and he went into the house. Billy remained alone on the porch. Perhaps still in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight.

Chapter 24 Three butterflies, aerial geishas, danced out of the sunshine, into the porch shadows. Their silken kimonos flaring and folding and flaring in graceful swirls of color, as bashful as faces hidden behind the pleats of hand-painted fans, they fled, quick, into the brightness from which they had come. Performance. Perhaps this was the word that defined the killer, that would lead to an explanation of his actions, and that if understood would reveal his Achilles’ heel. According to Ralph Cottle, the freak had referred to the murder of a woman and to the peeling away of her face as “the second act” in one of his “best performances.” In assuming that the psychopath considered murder to be largely a thrilling game, Billy had been wrong. Sport might be part of it, but this man wasn’t entirely or even primarily motivated by a perverse sense of fun. Billy didn’t quite know what to make of the word performance. Maybe

to his nemesis, the world was a stage, reality was a fraud, and all was artifice. How that view could explain this homicidal behavior—or predict it—Billy didn’t know, couldn’t guess. Nemesis represented wrong thinking. A nemesis was an enemy who could not be defeated. The better word was adversary. Billy had not given up hope. With the front door standing open, the ring of the telephone would carry to the front porch. He had not heard it yet. Lazily rocking the chair, not to make a harder target of himself, but to disguise his anxiety and thus rob the killer of the chance to take any satisfaction from it, Billy studied the nearest California live oak and then the next to the nearest. They were huge old trees with broad canopies. Their trunks and branches looked black in the bright sun. In those shadowy arbors, a sniper might find a crook of branches to serve as a platform to accommodate him and a tripod for his rifle. The two nearest houses down-slope, one on this side of the road, one on the farther side, were well within the thousand-yard range. If nobody had been home, the freak could have broken into one of those places; he might now be at an upstairs window. Performance. Billy was not able to think of any person in his life to whom that word had greater relevance than it did to Steve Zillis. The tavern was a stage to Steve. Was it logical, however, that the freak, a vicious serial killer with a taste for mutilation, would have a sense of humor so simple and a concept of theater so puerile that he got a kick out of nose-shot peanuts, tongue-tied cherry stems, and jokes about dumb blondes? Repeatedly Billy glanced at the wristwatch on the porch railing. Three minutes was a reasonable wait, even four. But when five passed, that seemed to be too many. He started to get up from the chair, but he heard Cottle’s voice in memory—You can’t choose for me!—and a weight of responsibility pressed him back into the rocker.

Because Billy had kept Cottle on the porch past the five-minute deadline, the freak might be playing payback, making them wait so their nerves would fray a little, to teach them not to screw with the big dog. That thought comforted Billy for a minute. Then a more ominous possibility occurred to him. When Cottle hadn’t gone into the house promptly at the five-minute mark, when Billy had delayed two or three minutes, maybe the killer had taken the lack of punctuality to mean that Billy refused to choose a victim, which was indeed the case. Having made that assumption, the freak might have decided that he had no reason to call Ralph Cottle. At that moment he could have picked up his rifle and walked out of the woods or away from one of the houses down-slope. If he’d selected a victim in advance of hearing Billy’s answer, which surely he had done, he might be eager to get on with his plans. One of the people in Billy’s life, the most important person, was of course Barbara, helpless in Whispering Pines. Independent of any experience or knowledge that would justify his confidence, Billy sensed that this bizarre drama was still in the first act of three. His wretched antagonist was far from ready to conclude this performance; therefore, Barbara was not in imminent jeopardy. If the freak knew anything about the subject of his torment—and he seemed to know a lot—he would realize that Barbara’s death would instantly take all the fight out of Billy. Resistance was essential to drama. Conflict. Without Billy, there would be no act two. He must take steps to protect Barbara. But he needed to think hard about how, and he had time to do so. If he was wrong about that, if Barbara was next, then this world was about to become a brief and bitter purgatory before he quickly moved on to a room in Hell. Seven minutes had passed since Cottle had gone inside, seven and counting. Billy got up from the rocker. His legs felt weak. He pulled the revolver

from the box of Ritz crackers. He didn’t care if the drunkard saw it. At the threshold of the open door, he called out, “Cottle?” and received no reply, and said, “Cottle, damn it.” He went into the house, crossed the living room, and stepped into the kitchen. Ralph Cottle wasn’t there. The back door stood open, and Billy knew that he had left it closed, locked. He went out onto the back porch. Cottle wasn’t there, either, nor was he in the yard. He had gone. The phone hadn’t rung, yet Cottle had gone. Maybe when the call hadn’t come in, Cottle had taken the silence to be a sign that the killer judged him a failure. He could have panicked and fled. Returning to the house, closing the door behind himself, Billy swept the kitchen with his gaze, looking for something amiss. He had no idea what that might be. Everything seemed to be as it had been, as it should be. Uncertainty gave way to misgiving, however, and misgiving became suspicion. Cottle must have taken something, brought something, done something. From the kitchen to the living room, to the study, Billy found nothing out of the ordinary, but in the bathroom he discovered Ralph Cottle. Dead.

Chapter 25 Hard fluorescent light painted a film of faux frost on Cottle’s open eyes. Having passed on rather than out, the drunk sat on the lidded seat of the toilet, leaning against the tank, head tipped back, mouth slack. Yellow rotten teeth framed a tongue that appeared milky pink and vaguely fissured from

the dehydration of perpetual inebriation. Billy stood breathless, stunned stupid, then backed out of the bathroom into the hall, staring at the corpse through the doorway. He didn’t retreat because of any stench. Cottle had not voided bowels or bladder in his death throes. He remained unkempt but not filthy—the only thing about which he had seemed to have any pride. Billy just couldn’t breathe in the bathroom, as though all the air had been sucked out of that space, as though the dead man had been killed by a sudden vacuum that now threatened to suffocate Billy himself. In the hallway, he could draw breath again. He could begin to think. For the first time, he noticed the handle of the knife, which pinned Cottle’s rumpled suit coat to him. A bright-yellow handle. The blade had been thrust at an upward angle between the ribs on the left side, buried to the hilt. The heart had been pierced, and stopped. Billy knew that the embedded blade measured six inches. The yellow knife belonged to him. He kept it in his angler’s kit in the garage. It was a fishing knife, honed sharp to gut bass and fillet trout. The killer had not been in the woods or in a meadow swale, or in a neighbor’s house watching them through a telescopic rifle sight. That was a lie, and the drunkard had believed it. As Cottle had approached the front porch, the freak must have entered by the back door. While Billy and his visitor had sat in the rockers, their adversary had been in the house, a few feet from them. Billy had refused to choose someone in his life to be the next victim. As promised, the killer then made the choice with startling swiftness. Although Cottle had been the next thing to a stranger, he was undeniably in Billy’s life. And now in his house. Dead. In less than a day and a half, in just forty-one hours, three people had been murdered. Yet this still felt to Billy like act one; perhaps it was the end of act one, but his gut instinct told him that significant developments lay ahead. At every turn of events, he had done what seemed to be the most

sensible and cautious thing, especially given his personal history. His common sense and caution, however, played into the killer’s hands. Hour by hour, Billy Wiles was drifting farther from any safe shore. Down in Napa, evidence that might incriminate him had been planted in the house where Giselle Winslow had been murdered. Hairs from his shower drain. He didn’t know what else. No doubt evidence had been salted in Lanny Olsen’s house, as well. For one thing, the place marker in the book under Lanny’s dead hand was all but certainly a photo of Winslow, linking the crimes. Now in his bathroom slumped a corpse from which bristled a knife that belonged to him. Here in summer, Billy felt as if he were on an icy slope, the bottom invisible beyond a cold mist, still on his feet in a wild glissade, but gaining speed that, second by second, threatened his balance. Initially the discovery of Cottle’s corpse had shocked Billy into mental and physical immobility. Now several courses of action occurred to him, and he stood hobbled by indecision. The worst thing he could do was act precipitately. He needed to think this through, attempt to foresee the consequences of each of his options. He could afford no more mistakes. His freedom depended on his wits and courage. So did his survival. Stepping into the bathroom again, he noticed no gore. Maybe this meant Cottle hadn’t been killed in the bath. Billy hadn’t seen evidence of violence elsewhere in the house, either. This realization focused him on the handle of the knife. Around the point of penetration, dark blood soaked the lightweight summer suit jacket, but the stain wasn’t as large as he would have expected. The killer had finished Cottle with a single thrust. He’d known precisely where and how to slip the thin blade between the ribs. The heart had stopped within a beat or two of being punctured, which minimized the bleeding. Cottle’s hands lay in his lap, one upturned and the other cupped against it, as if he’d died while applauding his killer. Mostly concealed, something was captured between the hands. When Billy pinched a corner of

the object and pulled it free of the dead man’s grasp, he discovered a computer diskette: red, high density, the same brand that he had used in the days when he had worked at his computer. He studied the body from different angles. He turned slowly in a full circle, surveying the bathroom for any clues the killer might have left either intentionally or inadvertently. Sooner than later, he should probably go through Cottle’s coat and pants pockets. The diskette gave him an excuse to postpone that unpleasant task. In the study, after putting the revolver and the diskette on the desk, he removed the vinyl cover from his shrouded computer. He had not used the machine in almost four years. Curiously, he had never unplugged it. He supposed this might be an unconscious expression of his stubborn—if fragile—hope that Barbara Mandel might one day recover. In his second year of college, when he realized that not much of what he learned there would help him become the writer he wanted to be, he had dropped out. He had done manual labor of various kinds, writing diligently in his spare time. At twenty-one, he had taken his first bartending job. The work had seemed ideal for a writer. He saw story material in every barfly. Patiently developing his talent, he sold more than a score of well-received short stories to a variety of magazines. When he was twenty-five, a major publisher had wanted to collect them in a book. The book sold modestly but earned critical praise, suggesting that bartending would not forever be his primary occupation. When Barbara came into Billy’s life, she provided not merely encouragement but also inspiration. Just by knowing her, by loving her, he found a truer and clearer voice in his prose. He wrote his first novel, and his publisher responded to it with excitement. The revisions suggested by the editor were minor, a month’s work. Then he lost Barbara to the coma. The truer and clearer voice in his prose had not been lost with her. He could still write. The desire to write, however, slipped away from him, and the will to write, and all interest in storytelling. He no longer wanted to explore the human condition in fiction, for he had too much hard experience of it in reality. For two years, his publisher and editor were patient. But the month’s work on his manuscript had become to him more than a lifetime of labor.

He could not do it. He repaid the advance and canceled the contract. Switching on this computer, even just to review what the killer had left in Ralph Cottle’s hands, felt like a betrayal of Barbara, although she would have disapproved of—even mocked—such thinking. He was a little surprised when the machine, so long unused, at once came to life. The screen brightened, and the operating-system logo appeared as the simulated harp strings of the signature music issued from the speakers. The computer might have been used more recently than he thought. The fact that the diskette was the same brand as the unused diskettes in one of his desk drawers suggested that it was in fact one of his and that the freak had composed his latest message at this keyboard. Oddly enough, he was creeped out by this realization even more than he had been when he’d found the corpse in his bathroom. Long unseen yet familiar, the software menu appeared. Because he had written his fiction in Microsoft Word, he tried it first. That choice proved correct. The killer had written his message in Word, as well; and it loaded at once. The diskette contained three documents. Before Billy could review the text, the telephone rang. He figured it must be the freak.

Chapter 26 Billy picked up the phone. “Hello?” Not the freak. A woman said, “To whom am I speaking?” “To whom am I speaking? You called me.”

“Billy, that sounds like you. This is Rosalyn Chan.” Rosalyn was a friend of Lanny Olsen. She worked for the Napa County Sheriff’s Department. She came into the tavern now and then. Before Billy had been able to decide what to do about Lanny’s body, it must have been found. The instant that he realized he hadn’t responded to her, Rosalyn said probingly, “Are you all right?” “Me? I’m fine. Doin’ okay. This heat’s making me crazy, though.” “Is something wrong there?” He flashed on a mental image of Cottle’s corpse in the bathroom, and guilt rolled his mind into angles of disorientation. “Wrong? No. Why would there be?” “Did you just call here and hang up without saying anything?” Clouds of mystification thickened for a moment, then abruptly evaporated. For a moment he had forgotten what Rosalyn did in the sheriff’s department. She was a 911 operator. The name and address of every 911 caller appeared on her monitor as soon as she picked up the phone at her end. “That was just—what?—was that even a minute ago?” he asked, thinking fast, or trying to. “A minute ten now,” Rosalyn said. “Did you—” “What I did,” he said, “is I keyed in 911 when I meant to call information.” “You meant to call 411?” “I meant to call 411, but I pressed 911. I realized right away what I’d done, so I hung up.” The freak was still in the house. The freak had called 911. Why he had done this, what he hoped to achieve, Billy couldn’t figure, at least not under this pressure. “Why didn’t you stay on the line,” Rosalyn Chan asked, “and tell me the call was made in error?”

“I realized my mistake right away, I hung up so fast, I didn’t think a connection had been made yet. That was stupid. I’m sorry, Rosalyn. I was calling 411.” “So you’re all right?” “I’m all right. It’s just this crazy heat.” “Don’t you have air conditioning?” “I have it, but it conked out.” “That sucks.” “Totally.” The revolver lay on the desk. Billy picked it up. The freak was in the house. “Hey, maybe I’ll stop in the tavern around five,” she said. “Well, I won’t be there. I’m feeling sort of punky, so I called in sick.” “I thought you said you were fine.” So easy to trip himself up. He needed to look for the intruder, but he needed to sound right to Rosalyn. “I am fine. I’m okay. Nothing serious. Just a little stomach thing. Maybe it’s a summer cold. I’m taking that nasal gel stuff.” “What stuff?” “You know, that zinc gel, you squeeze it up your nose, it knocks the cold right out of you.” She said, “I think I heard about that.” “It’s good. It works. Jackie O’Hara put me on to it. You should keep some on hand.” “So everything’s okay there?” she asked. “Except for the heat and me feeling punky, but you can’t do much about that. Nine-one-one can’t fix a cold or an air conditioner. I’m sorry, Rosalyn. I feel like an idiot.”

“It’s no big deal. Half the calls we get aren’t emergencies.” “They aren’t?” “People call, their cat’s in a tree, the neighbors are having a noisy party, things like that.” “That makes me feel better. At least I’m not the biggest idiot on the block.” “Just take care of yourself, Billy.” “I will. You too. You take care of yourself.” “Bye,” she said. He put down the phone and rose from his chair. While Billy had been in the bathroom with the corpse, the freak had come back into the house. Or maybe he had already been inside, hiding in a closet or somewhere that Billy hadn’t checked. The guy had balls. Big brass ones. He knew about the .38, but he came back into the house and he called 911 while Billy was taking the vinyl cover off the computer. The freak might still be here. Doing what? Doing something. Billy crossed the study to the door, which he had left open. He went through fast, two hands on the revolver, sweeping it left, then right. The freak wasn’t in the hall. He was somewhere.

Chapter 27 Although Billy Wiles wasn’t wearing his wristwatch, he knew that time was running out as fast as water through a sieve.

In the bedroom, he slid aside one of the closet doors. No one. The space under the bed was too tight. No one would choose to hide under there because squirming out quickly wasn’t possible; that hiding place would be a trap. Besides, no overhanging spread curtained that low space. Looking under the bed would be a waste of time. Billy started toward the door. He returned to the bed, dropped to one knee. A waste. The freak was gone. He was crazy, but he wasn’t crazy enough to stay here after calling 911 and hanging up on them. In the hallway again, Billy hurried to the threshold of the bathroom. Cottle sat alone in there. The shower curtain was drawn open. If it had been drawn shut, it would have been a prime place to look. A large hall closet housed the oil-fired furnace. It offered no options. The living room. An open space, easy to search with a sweep of the eyes. The kitchen cabinetry featured a tall, narrow broom closet. No good. He tore open the door to the walk-in pantry. Canned goods, boxes of pasta, bottles of hot sauce, household supplies. Nowhere to hide a grown man. In the living room again, he shoved the revolver deep under a sofa cushion. It didn’t leave a visible lump, but anyone who sat on the gun would feel it. He had left the front door standing open. An invitation. Before hastening once more to the bathroom, he closed the door. Cottle with his head tipped back and his mouth open, with his hands together in his lap as if clapping, might have been singing Western swing and keeping time. The knife sawed against bone as Billy pulled it out of the wound. Blood smeared the blade. With a few Kleenex plucked from a box beside the sink, he wiped the knife clean. He balled up the tissues and put them on top of the toilet tank.

He folded the blade into the yellow handle and put the knife beside the sink. When Billy shifted the corpse sideways on the toilet, the head fell forward, and a gaseous sputter escaped the lips, as if Cottle had died on an inhalation, as if his last breath, until now, had been trapped in his throat. He hooked his arms under the dead man’s arms. Trying to avoid the blood-soaked part of the suit coat, Billy hauled him off the toilet. Worn thin by a diet of spirits, Cottle weighed hardly more than an adolescent. Carrying him would be too difficult, however, because he was gangly, spindle-legged. Fortunately, rigor mortis had not begun to set in. Cottle was limp, flexible. Shuffling backward, Billy dragged the body out of the bathroom. The heels of the dead man’s sneakers squeaked and stuttered along the ceramic-tile floor. They protested against the polished Santos-mahogany floors of the hall and study, too, all the way around behind the desk, where he lowered the corpse to the hardwood. Billy heard himself breathing hard, not so much from exertion as from high anxiety. Time rushed away, rushed like a river over a falls. After rolling the office chair aside, he shoved the corpse into the knee space. He had to bend the legs to make the dead man fit. He swung the chair in front of the computer again. He pushed it as far into the knee space as possible. The desk was deep and had a privacy panel on the front. Anyone who came into the room would have to walk all the way behind the work station and peer purposefully into the kneehole to see the cadaver. Even then, because of the chair and depending on the angle of view, a casual look might not reveal this grisly secret. Shadows would be helpful. Billy switched off the overhead light. He left only the desk lamp aglow.

In the bathroom once more, he saw a smear of blood on the floor. None had been there before he’d moved Cottle. His heart was a kicking horse battering the board walls of his chest. One mistake. If he made one mistake here, it would finish him. His time perception was whacked. He knew that only a few minutes had passed since he’d set out to search the house, but he felt as if ten minutes had fled, fifteen. He wished that he had his wristwatch. He didn’t dare take the time to retrieve it from the front-porch railing. With a wad of toilet paper, he wiped the blood off the floor. The tiles came clean, but a faint discoloration remained in a section of grout. It looked like rust, not like blood. That’s what he wanted to believe. Into the toilet he dropped the wad of paper as well as the Kleenex with which he had swabbed the blade of the knife. He flushed them away. The murder weapon lay on the counter beside the sink. He buried it at the back of a vanity drawer, behind bottles of shaving lotion and suntan oil. When he slammed the drawer shut so hastily, so hard, that it banged like a gunshot, he knew he needed to get a tighter grip on himself. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. He would remain calmer if he remembered his true purpose. His true purpose was not the endless cycle of idea and action, was not the preservation of his freedom or even his life. He must live that she could live, helpless but safe, helpless and sleeping and dreaming but subjected to no indignity, no evil. He was a shallow man. He had often proved that truth to himself. In the face of suffering, he had not possessed the strength of will to pursue his gift for the written word. He rejected the gift not just once but a damning number of times, for gifts conferred by the power that had conferred this one are perpetually offered and can come to nothing only if they are perpetually rejected. In his suffering, he had been humbled by the limitations of language, which he should have been. He had also been defeated by the limitations of language, which he should not have been.

He was a shallow man. He did not have within him the capacity to care deeply about multitudes, to accept every neighbor into his heart without qualification. The power of compassion was in him merely an ability, and its potentiality seemed to be fulfilled by caring for one woman. Because of this shallowness, he believed himself to be a weak man, perhaps not as weak as Ralph Cottle, but not strong. He had been chilled but never surprised when the stewbum had said I see the way you’re a little like me. The sleeper, safe and dreaming, was his true purpose and also his only hope of redemption. For that, he must care and not care; he must be still. Calmer than when he had slammed the drawer, Billy reviewed the bathroom one more time. He saw no evidence of the crime. Time was still a river rushing, a spinning wheel. Hurriedly but thoroughly, he retraced the route along which he had dragged the dead man, searching for additional smears of blood like the one in the bathroom. He discovered none. Doubting himself, he quickly toured the bedroom, living room, and kitchen once more. He tried to see everything through the eyes of suspicious authority. Only the situation on the front porch remained to be set right. He had left that task for last because it was less urgent than the need to conceal the corpse. In case he didn’t have time to address the porch, he took from a kitchen cabinet the bottle of bourbon with which he had spiked his Guinness stout on Monday night. He swigged directly from the bottle. Instead of swallowing, he swished the whiskey between his teeth, around his mouth, as if it were mouthwash. The longer he held the alcohol, the more it burned his gums, tongue, cheeks. He spat it in the sink before he remembered to gargle. He rinsed his mouth with another swig but also let it churn in his throat for several seconds. With a wheeze but not a choke, he spat this second mouthful in the sink just as the expected knock came at the front door, loud and protracted.

Perhaps four minutes had passed since he’d hung up the phone after his conversation with Rosalyn Chan. Maybe five. It felt like an hour; it felt like ten seconds. As the knock sounded, Billy turned on the cold water to wash the reek of booze out of the sink. He left it streaming. In the quiet after the knock, he capped the bourbon and returned it to the cabinet. At the sink once more, he cranked off the water as the knocking came again. Answering at once on the first knock might have made him seem anxious. Waiting for a third might make it appear as though he had considered not answering at all. Crossing the living room, he thought to examine his hands. He did not see any blood.

Chapter 28 When Billy Wiles opened the front door, he found a sheriff’s deputy standing three cautious steps from the threshold and to one side. The cop’s right hand rested on the pistol in the swivel holster at his hip, rested there not as if he were prepared to draw it, but as casually as anyone might stand with a hand on his hip. Billy had hoped that he would know him. He didn’t. The officer’s badge featured a nameplate: Sgt. V. Napolitino. At forty-six, Lanny Olsen had held the same rank—deputy—at which he had entered service as a younger man. In his early twenties, V. Napolitino had already been promoted to sergeant. He had the well-scrubbed, clear-eyed, intelligent, and diligent look

of a man who would make lieutenant by twenty-five, captain by thirty, commander by thirty-five, and chief before forty. Billy’s preference would have been a fat, rumpled, weary, and cynical specimen. Maybe this was one of those days when you should stay away from roulette because every bet on black would ensure a red number. “Mr. Wiles?” “Yeah. That’s me.” “William Wiles?” “Billy, yes.” Sergeant Napolitino shifted his attention back and forth between Billy and the living room behind him. The sergeant’s face remained expressionless. His eyes revealed neither apprehension nor even disquiet, nor as much as wariness, but were only watchful. “Mr. Wiles, would you mind stepping out to my car with me?” The sheriffs-department cruiser stood in the driveway. “You want to come in?” Billy asked. “Not necessarily, sir. Just to the car for a minute or two, if you don’t mind.” This almost sounded like a request, but it wasn’t. “Sure,” Billy said. “All right.” A second patrol car pulled off the county blacktop, into the driveway, and halted ten feet behind the first. As Billy reached for the knob to pull the front door shut after him, Sergeant Napolitino said, “Why don’t you leave it open, sir.” The deputy’s tone of voice did not signify either a question or a suggestion. Billy left the door open. Napolitino clearly expected him to lead the way. Billy stepped over the pint bottle, past the spilled Seagram’s.

Although the puddle was at least fifteen minutes old, less than half of it had evaporated in the heat. In the still air, the porch stank of whiskey. Billy went down the steps and onto the lawn. He didn’t pretend to be unsteady. He wasn’t a good enough actor to play drunk, and any attempt to do so would call his sincerity into doubt. He intended to rely on his potent breath to suggest functional inebriation and to give credence to the story that he intended to tell. As a deputy got out of the second patrol car, Billy recognized him. Sam Sobieski. He also was a sergeant, and perhaps five years older than Sergeant Napolitino. Sobieski visited the tavern once in a while, usually with a date. He came for the bar food more than to drink, and two beers were his limit. Billy didn’t know him well. They weren’t friends, but knowing him at all was better than dealing with two strangers. On the front lawn, Billy turned to look back at the house. Napolitino was still on the porch. He managed to cross to the steps and begin to descend without fully turning his back on either the open door or the windows, yet appearing unconcerned all the while. Now he took the lead and brought Billy around the patrol car, putting it between them and the house. Sergeant Sobieski joined them. “Hi, Billy.” “Sergeant Sobieski. How’re you doin’?” Everybody called a bartender by his first name. In some cases, you knew familiarity was expected in return; in this case not. “Yesterday was chili day, and I forgot,” said Sobieski. Billy said, “Ben makes the best chili.” “Ben is a chili god,” Sobieski said. The car was a lodestone to the sun, scorching the air around it and no doubt blistering to the touch. First on the scene, Napolitino took charge: “Mr. Wiles, are you all

right?” “Sure. I’m okay. This is about my screw-up, I guess.” “You called 911,” Napolitino said. “I meant to call 411.1 told Rosalyn Chan.” “You didn’t tell her until she called you back.” “I hung up so fast I didn’t realize a connection had been made.” “Mr. Wiles, are you to any degree under duress?” “Duress? Hey, no. You mean was somebody holding a gun to my head when I was on the phone with Rosalyn? Wow. That’s a pretty wild idea. No offense, I know that sort of thing happens, but not to me.” Billy cautioned himself to give short answers. Longer ones could sound like nervous babbling. “You called in sick to work?” Napolitino asked. “Yeah.” Grimacing but not too dramatically, he put one hand on his abdomen. “I’ve got this stomach thing.” He hoped they could smell his breath. He himself could smell it. If they could smell his breath, they would think his claim of illness was a lame attempt to conceal the fact that he was on a little bit of a bender. “Mr. Wiles, who else lives here?” “No one. Just me. I live alone.” “Is anyone in the house right now?” “No. No one.” “No friend or member of the family?” “No. Not even a dog. Sometimes I think about getting a dog, but I never do.” Scalpels were not sharper than Sergeant Napolitino’s dark eyes. “Sir, if there’s a bad guy in there—” “No bad guy,” Billy assured him.

“If someone you care about is being held in there under duress, the best thing you could do is tell me.” “Of course. I know that. Who wouldn’t know that?” The intense heat coming off the sun-hammered car made Billy half sick. His face felt seared. Neither of the sergeants appeared to be bothered by the broiling air. “Under stress, intimidated,” Sobieski said, “people make bad decisions, Billy.” “Sweet Jesus,” Billy said, “I really made an ass of myself this time, hanging up on 911, then what I said to Rosalyn.” “What did you say to her?” Napolitino asked. Billy was certain they knew the essentials of what he had said, and he himself remembered every word with piercing clarity, but he hoped to convince them that he was too booze-confused to recall quite how he had gotten himself in this predicament. “Whatever I said, it must have been stupid if I gave her the idea somebody might be giving me trouble. Duress. Man. This is way embarrassing.” He shook his head at his foolishness, found a dry laugh, and shook his head again. The sergeants just watched him. “No one’s here but me. No one’s come around here in days. No one’s ever here but me. I pretty much keep to myself, it’s the way I am.” That was enough. He was perilously close to babbling again. If they knew about Barbara, they knew how he was. If they didn’t know about her, Rosalyn would tell them. He had taken a risk by saying that nobody had visited in days. Rightly or wrongly, he’d felt that he should make a point of his reclusive life. If someone in the nearest houses down-slope had seen Ralph Cottle walking up this driveway or had noticed him sitting on the porch, and if the sergeants decided to have a word with the neighbors, Billy would be caught

in a lie. “What happened to your forehead?” Napolitino asked. Until that moment, Billy had forgotten about the hook wounds in his brow, but a low throbbing pain arose in them when the sergeant asked the question.

Chapter 29 “Isn’t that a bandage?” Sergeant Napolitino persisted. Although Billy’s thick hair fell over his forehead, it did not entirely conceal the gauze pads and adhesive tape. “I had a little table—saw accident,” Billy said, pleasantly surprised by the swiftness with which a suitable lie occurred to him. “Sounds serious,” Sergeant Sobieski said. “It’s not. It’s nothing. I have a woodworking shop in the garage. I built all the cabinetry in the house. Last night, I was working on something, cutting a walnut one-by-six, and there was a knot in it. The blade cracked the knot, and a few splinters shot into my forehead.” “You could lose an eye like that,” Sobieski said. “I wear safety goggles. I always wear goggles.” Napolitino said, “Did you go to a doctor?” “Nah. No need. Just some splinters. I dug ‘em out with tweezers. Hell, the only reason I need a bandage is I did more damage with the tweezers, getting the splinters out, than they did going in.” “Be careful about infection.” “I soaked it with alcohol, hydrogen peroxide. Smeared Neosporin on it.

I’ll be all right. This kind of thing, it happens.” Billy felt that he had satisfied their concerns. To his ear, he didn’t sound like a man under duress, with a life-or-death problem. The sun was a furnace, a forge, and the heat coming off the car cooked him more effectively than a microwave oven might have done, but he was cool. When the questioning took a negative and more aggressive turn, he didn’t at once recognize the change. “Mr. Wiles,” said Napolitino, “did you then call information?” “Did I what?” “After you mistakenly dialed 911 and hung up, did you dial 411 as you had intended?” “No, I just sat there for a minute thinking about what I’d done.” “You sat there for a minute thinking how you had mistakenly dialed 911?” “Well, not a whole minute. However long it was. I didn’t want to screw up again. I was feeling a little woozy. Like I said, my stomach. Then Rosalyn called me back.” “Before you could dial 411 for information, she called back.” “That’s right.” “After your conversation with the 911 operator—” “Rosalyn.” “Yes. After your conversation with her, did you then call 411?” The telephone company imposed a 411 service charge for each call. If he had placed one, they would have a record of it. “No,” Billy said. “I felt like such a bonehead. I needed a drink.” The reference to a drink had come naturally, not as if he were trying to sell them on his supposed inebriation. He thought he had sounded smooth, convincing.

Napolitino said, “What number would you have asked for if you had called 411?” Billy realized that these inquiries were no longer related to his welfare and safety. A veiled antagonism colored Napolitino’s questions, subtle but unmistakable. Billy wondered if he should openly acknowledge this development and question their intent. He didn’t want to appear guilty. “Steve,” he said. “I needed Steve Zillis’s number.” “He is… ?” “He’s a bartender at the tavern.” “He covers your shift when you’re sick?” Napolitino asked. “No. He works the shift after mine. Why’s it matter?” “Why did you need to call him?” “I just wanted to warn him that I was out, and when he came on he’d have a mess to clean up because Jackie would have been tending bar alone.” “Jackie?” Napolitino asked. “Jackie O’Hara. He’s the owner. He’s covering my shift. Jackie doesn’t continually tidy the work bar, the lower bar, like he should. The clutter and spills just build up till the guy following him needs like a frantic fifteen minutes to get the set-up workable again.” Every time Billy had to give a longer, more explanatory answer, he heard a shakiness arise in his voice. He didn’t think that he was imagining it; he believed that the sergeants could hear it, too. Maybe everyone sounded this way when talking to on-duty cops for any substantial length of time. Maybe uneasiness was natural. A lot of gesturing was not natural, however, especially not for Billy. During his longer answers, he found himself using his hands too much, and he couldn’t control them. Defensively, but trying to appear casual, he slipped his hands into the pockets of his chinos. In each pocket, his fingers found three .38 cartridges, spare ammunition. Napolitino said, “So you wanted to warn Steve Zillis he’d have a mess.”

“That’s right.” “You don’t know Mr. Zillis’s phone number?” “I don’t call him often.” They were not engaged in an innocent Q and A anymore. They had not descended to the level of an interrogation yet, but they were on the down escalator. Billy did not quite understand why this should be the case—except that perhaps his answers and his demeanor had not been as exculpatory as he had thought. “Isn’t Mr. Zillis’s number in the directory?” “I guess so. But sometimes it’s just easier to call 411.” “Unless you mistakenly dial 911,” Napolitino said. Billy decided that making no reply would be better than berating himself for idiocy, as he had done earlier. If the situation deteriorated to the point where they decided to search him, even just to pat him down, they would find the cartridges in his pockets. He wondered if he’d be able to explain the bullets with another facile and convincing lie. At the moment, he couldn’t think of one. But he couldn’t believe it would ever come to that. The deputies were here because they had been concerned that he might be in danger. He had only to convince them that he was safe, and they would leave. Something that he had said—or had not said—left them with lingering doubts. If he could only find the right words, the magic words, the sergeants would go away. Now, here, he chafed again at the limitations of language. As real as the change in Napolitino’s attitude seemed, a part of Billy argued that he was imagining it. The strain of disguising his anxiety had bent his perceptions, had made him a little paranoid. He counseled himself to be still, to have patience. “Mr. Wiles,” said Napolitino, “are you absolutely sure that you yourself dialed 911?” Although Billy could parse that sentence, he couldn’t quite make sense out of it. He couldn’t grasp the intention behind the question, and considering everything that he had told them thus far, he didn’t know what answer they expected from him. “Is there any possibility whatsoever that someone else in your house

placed that call to 911?” Napolitino pressed. For an instant Billy thought somehow they knew about the freak, but then he understood. He understood. Sergeant Napolitino’s question was phrased with an eye toward eventual legal challenges to police procedure. What he wanted to ask Billy was more direct: Mr. Wiles, are you holding someone in your house under duress, and did she get free long enough to dial 911, and did you tear the phone out of her hand and hang up, hoping a connection had not been made? To ask the question more bluntly than he had done, Napolitino would first have had to inform Billy of his constitutional right to remain silent and to have an attorney present during questioning. Billy Wiles had become a suspect. They were on the brink. A precipice. Never had Billy’s mind calculated options and consequences so feverishly, aware that every second of hesitation made him appear guiltier. Fortunately, he did not have to counterfeit a flabbergasted expression. His jaw must have looked unhinged. Not trusting his ability to fake anger or even indignation with any conviction whatsoever, Billy instead played his genuine surprise: “Good Lord, you don’t think… You do think I… Good Lord. I’m the last guy I’d expect to be mistaken for Hannibal Lecter.” Napolitino said nothing. Neither did Sobieski. Their eyes were as steady as the axis of a spinning gyroscope. “Of course you’d have to consider the possibility,” Billy said. “I understand. I do. It’s all right. Go inside if you want. Have a look around.” “Mr. Wiles, are you inviting us to search your house for an intruder or others?” His fingertips resting on the cartridges in his pockets, his mind’s eye resting on the shadowy form of Cottle in the knee space of the desk… “Search it for anything,” he said affably, as if relieved to understand at

last what was wanted of him. “Go ahead.” “Mr. Wiles, I am not asking to search your residence. You do see the situation?” “Sure. I know. It’s okay. Go to it.” If they were invited to enter, any evidence they found could be used in court. If instead they entered uninvited, without a warrant or without adequate reason to believe that someone inside might be in jeopardy, the court would throw out the same evidence. The sergeants would regard Billy’s cooperation, happily given, as highly suggestive of innocence. He felt relaxed enough to take his hands out of his pockets. If he was open, relaxed, sufficiently encouraging, they might decide that he had nothing to hide. They might go away without bothering to search the place. Napolitino glanced at Sobieski, and Sobieski nodded. “Mr. Wiles, since you would feel better if I did so, I’ll take a quick look through the house.” Sergeant Napolitino rounded the front of the patrol car and headed toward the porch steps, leaving Billy with Sobieski.

Chapter 30 Guilt spills itself in fear of being spilt, someone had said, perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps O.I. Simpson. Billy couldn’t remember who had nailed that thought so well in words, but he realized the truth in the aphorism and felt it keenly now. At the house, Sergeant Napolitino climbed the front steps and crossed

the porch, stepping over the pint bottle and whatever spilled whiskey had not yet evaporated. “Too Joe Friday,” Sobieski said. “Excuse me?” “Vince. He’s too deadpan. He gives you those flat eyes, that cast-concrete face, but he’s not really the hardass you think.” By sharing Napolitino’s first name, Sobieski seemed to be taking Billy into his confidence. Astutely alert for deception and manipulation, Billy suspected that the sergeant was no more taking him into his confidence than a trapdoor spider would greet an in-falling beetle with gentleness and brotherhood. At the house, Vince Napolitino disappeared through the open front door. “Vince has still got too much of the academy in him,” Sobieski continued. “When he’s seasoned a little more, he won’t come on so strong.” “He’s just doing his job,” Billy said. “I understand that. No big deal.” Sobieski remained in the driveway because he still at least half suspected Billy of some crime. Otherwise the two deputies would have searched the house together. Sergeant Sobieski was here to grab Billy if he tried to run. “How’re you feeling?” “I’m all right,” Billy said. “I just feel stupid putting you to all this trouble.” “I meant your stomach,” Sobieski said. “I don’t know. Maybe I ate something that was off.” “Couldn’t have been Ben Vernon’s chili,” Sobieski said. “That stuff is so hot it cures just about any sickness known to science.” Realizing that an innocent man, with nothing to fear, would not stare anxiously at the house, waiting for Napolitino to finish the search, Billy turned away from it and gazed out across the valley, at vineyards dwindling in a golden glare, toward mountains rising in blue haze.

“Crab will do it,” Sobieski said. “What?” “Crab, shrimp, lobster—if it’s a little off, it’ll cause true mayhem.” “I had lasagna last night.” “That sounds pretty safe.” “Maybe not my lasagna,” Billy said, trying to match Sobieski’s apparent nonchalance. “Come on, Vince,” the sergeant said with a trace of impatience. “I know you’re thorough, copadre. You don’t have to prove anything to me.” Then of Billy he asked, “You have an attic?” “Yeah.” The sergeant sighed. “He’ll want to check the attic.” Out of the west came a flock of small birds, swooping low and then soaring, swooping low again. They were flickers, unusually active for this heat. “Are you hunting for one of these?” Sobieski asked. The deputy offered the open end of a roll of breath mints. For an instant Billy was bewildered, until he realized that his hands were in his pockets again, fingering the bullets. He took his hands out of his chinos. “I’m afraid it’s a little late for this,” he said, but accepted the mint. “Occupational hazard, I guess,” said Sobieski. “A bartender, you’re around the stuff all day.” Sucking on the mint, Billy said, “Actually, I don’t drink that much. I woke up at three in the morning, couldn’t turn my mind off, worrying about things I can’t control anyway, thought a shot or two would knock me out.” “We all have nights like that. I call it the blue willies. You can’t drink them away, though. A mug of hot chocolate will cure just about any insomnia, but not even that works with the blue willies.”

“When the hooch didn’t do the job, it still seemed like a way to pass the night. Then the morning.” “You hold it well.” “Do I?” “You don’t seem blotto.” “I’m not. I’ve been tapering off the last few hours, trying to ease out of it to avoid a hangover.” “Is that the trick?” “It’s one of them.” Sergeant Sobieski was easy to talk to: far too easy. The flickers swooped low in their direction again, abruptly banked and soared and banked again, thirty or forty individuals flying as if with a single mind. “They’re a real nuisance,” Sobieski said of the birds. With pointed bills, flickers sought preferred houses and stables and churches of Napa County to drill elaborate lacelike patterns in wooden cornices, architraves, eaves, bargeboards, and corner boards. “They never bother my place,” Billy said. “It’s cedar.” Many people found the flickers’ destructive work so beautiful that damaged wood trim was not always replaced until time and weather brought it down. “They don’t like cedar?” Sobieski asked. “I don’t know. But they don’t like mine.” Having drilled its lacework, the flicker plants acorns in many of the holes, high on the building where the sun can warm them. After a few days, the bird returns to listen to the acorns. Hearing noise in some, not in others, it pecks open the noisy acorns to eat the larvae that are living inside. So much for the sanctity of the home. Flickers and sergeants will do their work.

Slowly, relentlessly, they will do it. “It’s not such a big place,” Billy said, allowing himself to sound slightly impatient, as he imagined that an innocent man would. When Sergeant Napolitino returned, he did not come out of the front door. He appeared along the south side of the house, from the direction of the detached garage. He did not approach with one hand resting casually on his gun. Maybe that was a good sign. As if by the sight of Napolitino, the birds were chased to a far corner of the sky. “That’s a nice wood shop you’ve got,” he told Billy. “You could do just about anything in there.” Somehow the young sergeant made it sound as if Billy might have used the power tools to dismember a body. Looking out across the valley, Napolitino said, “You’ve got a pretty terrific view here.” “It’s nice,” Billy said. “It’s paradise.” “It is,” Billy agreed. “I’m surprised you keep all your window shades down.” Billy had relaxed too soon. He said only half coherently, “When it’s this hot, I do, the sun.” “Even on the sides of the house where the sun doesn’t hit.” “On a day this bright,” Billy said, “dodging a whiskey headache, you want soothing gloom.” “He’s been tapering off the booze all morning,” Sobieski told Napolitino, “trying to ease his way sober and avoid a hangover.” “Is that the trick?” Napolitino asked. Billy said, “It’s one of them.”

“It’s nice and cool in there.” “Cool helps, too,” Billy said. “Rosalyn said you lost your air conditioning.” Billy had forgotten that little lie, such a small filament in his enormous patchwork web of deceit. He said, “It conks out for a few hours, then it comes on, then it conks out again. I don’t know if maybe it’s a compressor problem.” “Tomorrow’s supposed to be a scorcher,” Napolitino said, still gazing out across the valley. “Better get a repairman if they aren’t already booked till Christmas.” “I’m going to have a look at it myself a little later,” Billy said. “I’m pretty handy with things.” “Don’t go poking around in machinery until you’re full sober.” “I won’t. I’ll wait.” “Especially not electrical equipment.” “I’m going to make something to eat. That’ll help. Maybe it’ll even help my stomach.” Napolitino finally looked at Billy. “I’m sorry to have kept you out here in the sun, with your headache and all.” The sergeant sounded sincere, conciliatory for the first time, but his eyes were as cold and dark and humbling as the muzzles of a pair of pistols. “The whole thing’s my fault,” Billy said. “You guys were just doing your job. I’ve already said six ways I’m an idiot. There’s no other way to say it. I’m really sorry to have wasted your time.” “We’re here ‘to serve and protect.’” Napolitino smiled thinly. “It even says so on the door of the car.” “I liked it better when it said ‘the best deputies money can buy,’” said Sergeant Sobieski, surprising a laugh from Billy but drawing only a vaguely annoyed look from Napolitino. “Billy, maybe it’s time to stop the tapering off and switch to food.” Billy nodded. “You’re right.” As he walked to the house, he felt they were watching him. He didn’t

look back. His heart had been relatively calm. Now it pounded again. He couldn’t believe his luck. He feared that it wouldn’t hold. On the porch, he took his watch off the railing, put it on his wrist. He bent down to pick up the pint bottle. He didn’t see the cap. It must have rolled off the porch or under a rocker. At the table beside his chair, he dropped the three crackers into the empty Ritz box, which for a while had held the .38 revolver. He picked up the glass of cola. He expected to hear the engines of the patrol cars start up. They didn’t. Without glancing back, he carried the glass and the box and the bottle inside. He closed the door and leaned against it. Outside, the day remained still, the engines silent.

Chapter 31 Sudden superstition warned Billy that as long as he waited with his back against the door, Sergeants Napolitino and Sobieski would not leave. Listening, he went into the kitchen. He dropped the Ritz box in the trash can. Listening, he poured the last ounce of whiskey from the bottle into the sink, and then chased it with the cola in the glass. He put the bottle in the trash, the glass in the dishwasher. When by this time Billy had still heard no engines starting up, curiosity gnawed at him with ratty persistence. The blinded house grew increasingly claustrophobic. Perhaps because he knew that it contained a corpse, it seemed to be shrinking to the dimensions of a casket. He went into the living room, sorely tempted to put up one of the

pleated shades, all of them. But he didn’t want the sergeants to think that he raised the shades to watch them and that their continued presence worried him. Cautiously, he bent the edge of one of the shades back from the window frame. He was not at an angle to see the driveway. Billy moved to another window, tried again, and saw the two men standing at Napolitino’s car, where he’d left them. Neither deputy directly faced the house. They appeared to be deep in conversation. They weren’t likely to be discussing baseball. He wondered if Napolitino had thought to search the woodworking shop for the half-cut, one-by-six walnut plank with the knothole. The sergeant would not have found that length of lumber, of course, because it did not exist. When Sobieski turned his head toward the house, Billy at once let go of the shade. He hoped that he had been quick enough. Until they were gone, Billy could do nothing other than worry. With everything he had to fret about, however, it was odd that his all-enveloping fog of anxiety quickly condensed upon the bizarre idea that Ralph Cottle’s body no longer lay under the desk in the study, where he had left it. To have moved the cadaver, the killer would have had to return to the house while both of the deputies had been speaking with Billy in the driveway, before he himself had returned to the house. The freak had proved his boldness; but this would have been recklessness if not the worst temerity. If the corpse had been moved, however, he would have to find it. He couldn’t afford to wait until it turned up by surprise in an inconvenient and incriminating moment. Billy withdrew the .38 revolver from under the sofa cushion. When he broke out the cylinder and checked to be certain all six rounds were whole and loaded, he assured himself that this was an act of healthy suspicion, not a sign of creeping paranoia. He followed the hallway as the disquiet that rang softly along his nerves quickened and, by the time he crossed the threshold into the study, swelled

into clamorous alarm. He shoved the office chair out of the way. Embraced on three sides by the knee space, in the soft folds of his baggy and rumpled suit, Ralph Cottle looked like the meat of a walnut snugged inside its shell. Even minutes previously, Billy could not have imagined that he would ever be relieved to find a corpse in his house. He suspected that several pieces of subtle but direct evidence tying him to Cottle had been planted on the man’s body. Even if he took the time for a meticulous inspection of the cadaver, he would surely miss one incriminating bit or another. The body must be destroyed or buried where it would never be found. Billy had not yet decided how to dispose of it; but even as he coped with the mounting developments of the current crisis, dark corners of his mind were composing gruesome scenarios. Finding the body as he left it, he also discovered the computer screen aglow and waiting. He had loaded the diskette that he’d found in Cottle’s dead hands, but before he had been able to review its contents, Rosalyn Chan had called to ask if he had just phoned 911. He rolled the office chair in front of the desk once more. He sat before the computer, tucking his legs under the chair, away from the corpse. The diskette contained three documents. The first was labeled Why, without a question mark. When he accessed the document, he found that it was short: Because I, too, am a fisher of men. Billy read the line three times. He didn’t know what to make of it, but the hook wounds in his brow burned anew. He recognized the religious reference. Christ had been called a fisher of men. The easy inference was that the killer might be a religious fanatic who thought he heard divine voices urging him to kill, but easy inferences were usually wrong. Sound inductive reasoning required more than one particular from which to generalize.

Besides, the freak possessed a knack for duplicity, a faculty for obfuscation, a talent for deception, and a genius for carefully crafted enigma. He preferred the oblique to the straightforward, the circuitous to the direct. Why. Because I, too, am a fisher of men. The true, full meaning of that statement could not be surmised let alone ascertained in a hundred readings, nor in the limited time that Billy currently could devote to its analysis. The second document was labeled How. It proved to be no less mysterious than the first: Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. Although without rhyme or meter, that triad seemed almost to be a stanza of verse. As with the most recondite poetry, the meaning was not on the surface. Billy had the strange feeling that those three lines were three answers and that if only he knew the questions, he would also know the identity of the killer. Whether that impression might be reliable intuition or delusion, he had no time just now to consider it. Lanny’s body still awaited final disposition, as did Cottle’s. Billy was half convinced that if he consulted his wristwatch, he would see the minute and hour hands spinning as if they were counting off mere seconds. The third document on the diskette was labeled When, and as Billy accessed it, the dead man in the knee space seized his foot. If Billy could have breathed, he would have cried out. By the time the trapped exhalation exploded from his throat, however, he realized that the explanation was less supernatural than it had at first seemed. The dead man had not seized him; in Billy’s agitation, he had pressed his feet against the corpse. He tucked them under the chair once more. On the screen, the document labeled When offered a message that required less interpretation than Why and How. My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter.

Chapter 32 My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter. Billy Wiles consulted his wristwatch. A few minutes past noon, Wednesday. If the freak meant what he said, this performance, or whatever it was, would conclude in thirty-six hours. Hell was eternal, but any hell on earth must be by definition finite. The reference to a “last” killing did not necessarily mean that only one more murder lay ahead. In the past day and a half, the freak had killed three, and in the day and a half ahead, he might be no less murderous. Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. Of those nine words in the second document, one struck Billy as more pertinent than the others. Velocity. The movement had begun when the first note had been left under the windshield wiper on the Explorer. The impact would come with the last killing, the one meant to make him consider suicide. Meanwhile, at a steadily accelerating pace, new challenges were being thrown at Billy, keeping him off balance. The word velocity seemed to promise him that the longest plunges of this roller coaster were still ahead. He neither disbelieved the promise of increasing velocity nor dismissed the confident assertion that he would commit suicide. Suicide was a mortal sin, but Billy knew himself to be a shallow man, weak in some ways, flawed. At this point, he wasn’t capable of self-destruction; but hearts and minds can both be broken. He had little difficulty imagining what might drive him to such a brink. In fact, no difficulty at all. Barbara Mandel’s death alone would not drive him to suicide. For almost four years, he had prepared himself for her passing. He had hardened

himself to the idea of living without even the hope of her recovery. The manner of her murder, however, might cause a fatal stress crack in Billy’s mental architecture. In her coma, she might not be aware of much that the killer did to her. Nevertheless, assuming that she would be subjected to pain, to vile abuse, to gross indignities, Billy could imagine a weight of horror so great that he would break under it. This was a man who beat lovely young schoolteachers to death and peeled off women’s faces. Furthermore, if the freak intended to engineer circumstances in which it would appear that Billy himself had killed not only Giselle Winslow, Lanny, and Ralph Cottle, but also Barbara, then Billy would not want to endure months of being a media sensation or the spotlight of the trial, or the abiding suspicion with which he’d be regarded even if found innocent in a court of law. The freak killed for pleasure, but also with a purpose and a plan. Whatever the purpose, the plan might be to convince police that Billy committed the homicides leading to Barbara’s murder in her bed at Whispering Pines, that his intent had been to establish that a brutal serial killer was at work in the county, thereby directing suspicion from himself to the nonexistent psychopath. If the freak was clever—and he would be—the authorities would swallow that theory as if it were a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. After all, in their eyes, Billy had a strong motive to do away with Barbara. Her medical care was covered by the investment income earned by a seven-million-dollar trust fund established with a legal settlement from the corporation responsible for her coma. Billy was the primary of three trustees who managed the fund. If Barbara died while in a coma, Billy was the sole heir to her estate. He did not want the money, none of it, and would not keep it if it came to him. In that sad event, he had always intended to give the millions away. No one, of course, would believe that was his intention. Especially not after the freak was finished setting him up, if in fact that’s what the freak was doing. The call to 911 certainly seemed to signify that intention. It had drawn Billy to the attention of the sheriff’s department in a context that they would

remember… and wonder about. Now Billy combined all three documents and printed them on a single sheet of paper: Because I, too, am a fisher of men. Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter. With scissors, Billy trimmed out the block of text, intending to fold it and put it in his wallet, where he would have it for easy review. As he finished, he realized that this paper appeared identical to that on which he had received the first four messages from the killer. If the diskette in Cottle’s hands